I was struck by the difference in the approaches of the major search engines and the real-time search startups at SMX West. The startups are really thinking about how to make real-time search useful, while Google, Yahoo and Bing are just doing it. I don't believe just a real-time search stream is necessarily useful - what CrowdEye and Topsy are doing by ranking and archiving results is very interesting. Collecta has the ability to filter the stream by source, and OneRiot is pioneering ad delivery on real-time search results.