Trackle puts a new spin on real-time search

Trackle, angling to be a souped up, personalized version of Google Alerts, added search features to its site today. Now the Sunnyvale, Calif. company doesn’t just want to help users receive real-time alerts, but also to search those alerts as they’re published.

You can think of this as a variation on the trendy idea of real-time search. But most real-time search engines are focused on Twitter, and even Google’s recently announced real-time results seem to consist mainly of Twitter, Facebook, and news updates. Trackle alerts, on the other hand, can aggregate updates on a wide range of web sites, as well as databases that aren’t easily searchable.

Right now, the search page divides popular results into several different categories: people, deals (as in product deals), sports, places, companies, and buzz. Trackle offers some useful ways to filter those results, too. You can adjust a slider depending on whether you want to limit your results to highly credible sources (like a reputable news site)  or to include as many results as possible (bringing in things like random tweets). Results are also broken into categories like “business” and “web buzz.”

If you see a result that seems relevant, you can share it on Facebook or Twitter, or sign up to receive the Trackle alert stream that it came from. And if someone seems to have created a lot of alerts that you like, you can click through to their profile (assuming it’s public) and see what else they’ve subscribed to.

For example, if I do a search for Apple, I see related news articles, stock results, and tweets. When I click on the top result, I see that it comes from an alert set up on all tweets with the word iPhone, and I have the option of either setting up a similar alert for myself, setting up an alert with tweaked settings, or seeing what other alerts that user has created.

I’ve played around with the Trackle search system, and I have to say there’s a lot of information in there — it has the immediacy of a Twitter search, but with filtering controls and a greater ability to screen out the noise. However, the fact that it’s based on alerts created by users means there can be some shortcomings compared to, say, Google. Here’s an obvious one: Why is there only one result for Anthony Ha?

Trackle has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from angel investors and New Enterprise Associates.