Real-time search engines made our list as one of the top 5 Twitter related trends to watch, not only because the demand for these tools has increased, but also because we’re seeing services like Tweetmeme and OneRiot innovate at lightning speed in this space.

Collecta, which launches today, is also tackling real-time search, but their search engine uses XMPP technology and works to keep pace with information as it happens — faster than we’ve ever seen before — on blogs, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, news sites, and various other social sites.

At its core, Collecta is a search engine, but with the primary purpose of being completely real-time. So just type your search query, and watch as Collecta returns photos, videos, tweets, status updates, news items, and blog posts from across the web, and displays them in a constantly updating stream.

Collecta’s interface is incredibly user-friendly, so searches show up on the left-hand side of the page, search results appear in the middle, and then selected item content appears on the right. For each search, users can opt to include stories, comments, updates, photos, and video, or a combination of options. Plus, should the flux of results become overwhelming, you can opt to pause the stream.

Obviously the flow of information will be proportional to the popularity of your query, but we see Collecta as being a powerful resource for keeping up with important real-time events as they unfold — #iranelection for one — but with the added perspective of an aggregate web view. It has the fast-paced feel of real-time FriendFeed, with more utility than Twitter search or the several other social search sites already in existence.

We’re definitely impressed with Collecta’s real-time search engine, and we think they’re part of a movement that will help push more application developers to support search that keeps pace with the real-time web. Who knows, maybe Google will even step into the fray with something killer soon, and don’t forget that revamped Facebook search is pending too.

See also: 6 Twitter Search Tools Compared

Tags: collecta, real-time, Search, social search, XMPP