Stinky Teddy, search engine with a weird name and a fierce real-time

Meet Stinky Teddy, a gossip fuelled real-time search engine. As Read Write Web says, Stinky Teddy “reinvents meta-search for the real-time web”.

Okay so what’s with the silly name?
It sounds a like a joke student project, but was actually developed by one David Hardtke formerly a physicist at the University of California Berkeley Space Sciences Lab. His search engine was named after his daughter’s “trusted (and abused) stuffed bear.”

And what does it do?
Hardtke describes Stinky Teddy as a “real-time gossip powered metasearch,”. Uh? That means it combines search results from Bing, Yahoo, VideoSurf, Twitter and Collecta and reshuffles the search results to focus on topics that are trending right now.
Each search term gets a rating on the barchart Buzz-o-meter, depending of course on how buzzy it is.

And why is that special?
Well real-time search is a big trend – allowing users to get the latest results on any particular topic. If you’re searching for Brad Pitt for example, you’re probably interested in what he did this morning rather than finding out where he was born or who he is married to. Stinky Teddy assumes that searchers are most interested in the topics that are buzzing right now.

There are few real-time search engines already out there, but Stinky Teddy combines the old and the new by using tried and trusted meta-tag searches (that engines like Google use) but ordering the results according to real-time buzz, rather than by tag relevance.

So what’s it good for?
Great on searches for politicians and celebrities, and for ferreting out what’s new.

Check it out for yourself here – http://www.stinkyteddy.com/ – still in beta.