The creation of real-time search engines is one of my favorite developments of the web in the last year. As I mentioned in this video, using real-time search engines is how I find quite a few of the resources that I mention on Free Technology for Teachers. Real-time search engines are also great for tracking the developments of a breaking news story.

Itpints is a new real-time search engine that pulls results from Backtype and Twitter. The benefit of pulling results from Backtype is that is finds not only new stories, but also it finds stories that are being actively discussed and commented on by readers at any moment.

Applications for Education
Real-time search engines like Itpints are great resources to have when a story is breaking. These resources could be put to use by students in a current events course or in a journalism course. When I taught a current events course one of my favorite things to do was to have students analyze the reporting of one story from multiple sources. Real-time search makes it possible to get coverage of a story from multiple perspectives.

Here are the three other real-time search engines that you should try:
OneRiot
Scoopler
CrowdEye