• Fortune, Thursday, July 2, 2009 2:15 PM

When the Iranian government started cracking down on journalists following its recent election crisis, the world turned to social media sites like Twitter for real-time information coming out of the country. However, as Fortune's Jesse Hempel notes, it was hard to find reliable, useful information from the scores of tweets and updates "that included plenty of spam, useless remarks, and stray sentiments." In many ways, the Iranian crisis points to the newest problem on the Web, Hempel says: how to make sense of the real-time information emanating from sites like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and blogs. And Google, he says, "isn't cutting it."

Cue a group of fast-growing startups aiming to fill the real-time search void: Collecta, OneRiot and Scoopler. As IDC analyst Hadley Reynolds explains, "Yahoo, Microsoft and Google will take a while to figure out how to cope with this. There is definitely a window of business opportunity for startups."

But finding the right recipe for real-time results is far from easy or straightforward, Hempel says. "Inevitably, there is tension between information that is most recent, stuff that is most popular, and a subjective concept of content that is most important. There is no perfect solution." So far, he adds, none of the aforementioned search engines is particularly good, but at least they're recognizing a big opportunity.

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