[Guest post from Mike Green, VP Content and Syndication, Collecta]

As announced on Twitter’s blog last week, Collecta is one of the six search companies to follow the big guys in licensing Twitter’s firehose.   We’re pretty excited about it and think that the users who experience Collecta’s real-time streaming search results on either Collecta.com or one of our keyword driven widgets around the web will be too. What this means practically is that Collecta results will be more comprehensive, even lower-latency, and smoother in terms of presentation.

Today on Collecta, part of the experience is our own firehose of sorts — a real-time stream of content flowing from across the web that includes articles, photos, blog posts, comments, videos and social updates with latencies as low as .2 seconds between time of publish and time of delivery of a post as a relevant result in a user’s browser.  We combine this stream with data from Twitter Search/Summize to allow users to experience a full range of results for their queries.

However, once the firehose is fully integrated and we aren’t searching Twitter separately, we will be able to examine every tweet for relevance to any open queries on the Collecta network and shoot them through our optimized pipe one at a time, blended with the rest of our results by timestamp.  Meanwhile, we continue to create IP around delivering the right user experience — knowing what  to drop from these streams when the volume of results is high for a hot topic.  High volumes of data like the Twitter firehose are good news for these adaptive filtering systems — one of the many reasons we’re excited to be a new partner of Twitter’s in this way.