As I’ve written a few times, real-time search engines are a great way to find the latest developments in a news story. Real-time search engines are also great for finding trending topics in a niche area. For example, I use real-time search engines to discover trending topics in educational technology.

Faroo is a new real-time search that offers a couple of options not found in other real-time search engines. Faroo allows you to sort your search results by current popularity or sort your results in a timeline format. Faroo also gives you the option to preview a link’s content by hovering your cursor on the link without actually clicking the link. Finally, if you’re following a topic, you can subscribe to the RSS feed for your search and be notified of new results as they appear.

Applications for Education
Real-time search engines 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 brings in not only the stories from the major news outlets, but also brings in the “person on the street” perspective from social networks like Twitter and FriendFeed.

Here is a related item that may be of interest to you:
Real-Time Search Options