7 ms·

FriendFeed gets real-time search.

33 points by theforay 17y ago

jazzychad 17y ago
It appears to be accomplishing this using tight polling (from my investigation with FireBug). Interesting and useful, but not exactly innovative from what I can tell. Also, no way to pause or stop it?
- brlewis 17y ago
  What's interesting is that new posts are added to the search index in real time. Twitter used to have this (Track) but couldn't scale it; they're testing it and may reintroduce it. For FriendFeed to have put this out I think they must be confident it can scale.
  - sho 17y ago
    "For FriendFeed to have put this out I think they must be confident it can scale." I am not sure FriendFeed has to worry too hard about that yet, compared to Twitter: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/friendfeed.com+twitter.com/ http://siteanalytics.compete.com/friendfeed.com+twitter.com/
    - pclark 17y ago
      yet.
    - brlewis 17y ago
      Friendfeed does have to think about it compared to Twitter at the time they removed Track, more than a year ago. Even then Twitter had more traffic, but it wasn't nearly as dramatic a difference as in the more recent part of that graph.
- paul 17y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by "tight polling", but we basically keep a connection open to the server at all times (often known as "long polling"). This is similar to how IM works. You can pause it by pressing the pause button on the top-right of the feed.
  - jazzychad 17y ago
    Ah, I see you can pause it only if you are logged in. The jsonp requests I was seeing in FireBug did not exhibit the normal kind of long polling behavior I have seen on other sites, so I might have been wrong. Apologies.
heyrhett 17y ago
Whenever I hear FriendFeed, I can only think of FriendFace: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rNgCnY1lPg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rNgCnY1lPg
simonw 17y ago
Anyone know (and care to share) what FriendFeed's underlying search technology is? Entirely custom, based on Lucene or something else?
- budu3 17y ago
  It's probably custom made, based on a bit of that Google secret sauce that Paul was exposed to.
  - wheels 17y ago
    You don't need special Google sauce for plain text search. The tricky bit of something like this is scaling it out to where it's instantly indexing every new bit of text that comes across, but that's still, while a decent bit of engineering work, is not a conceptually terribly hard problem.
- paul 17y ago
  It started as Lucene, but is quite different by now as Jim (http://friendfeed.com/jim http://friendfeed.com/jim) had to create all of the real-time indexing and standing query support (at any moment, it is simultaneously executing thousands of queries).
vermontdevil 17y ago
Great we get all of Robert Scoble's posts in high speed.

33 points by theforay 17y ago

It appears to be accomplishing this using tight polling (from my investigation with FireBug). Interesting and useful, but not exactly innovative from what I can tell. Also, no way to pause or stop it?

brlewis 17y ago
What's interesting is that new posts are added to the search index in real time. Twitter used to have this (Track) but couldn't scale it; they're testing it and may reintroduce it. For FriendFeed to have put this out I think they must be confident it can scale.
- sho 17y ago
  "For FriendFeed to have put this out I think they must be confident it can scale." I am not sure FriendFeed has to worry too hard about that yet, compared to Twitter: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/friendfeed.com+twitter.com/ http://siteanalytics.compete.com/friendfeed.com+twitter.com/
  - pclark 17y ago
    yet.
  - brlewis 17y ago
    Friendfeed does have to think about it compared to Twitter at the time they removed Track, more than a year ago. Even then Twitter had more traffic, but it wasn't nearly as dramatic a difference as in the more recent part of that graph.
paul 17y ago
I'm not sure what you mean by "tight polling", but we basically keep a connection open to the server at all times (often known as "long polling"). This is similar to how IM works. You can pause it by pressing the pause button on the top-right of the feed.
- jazzychad 17y ago
  Ah, I see you can pause it only if you are logged in. The jsonp requests I was seeing in FireBug did not exhibit the normal kind of long polling behavior I have seen on other sites, so I might have been wrong. Apologies.

heyrhett 17y ago

Whenever I hear FriendFeed, I can only think of FriendFace: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rNgCnY1lPg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rNgCnY1lPg

simonw 17y ago

Anyone know (and care to share) what FriendFeed's underlying search technology is? Entirely custom, based on Lucene or something else?

budu3 17y ago
It's probably custom made, based on a bit of that Google secret sauce that Paul was exposed to.
- wheels 17y ago
  You don't need special Google sauce for plain text search. The tricky bit of something like this is scaling it out to where it's instantly indexing every new bit of text that comes across, but that's still, while a decent bit of engineering work, is not a conceptually terribly hard problem.
paul 17y ago
It started as Lucene, but is quite different by now as Jim (http://friendfeed.com/jim http://friendfeed.com/jim) had to create all of the real-time indexing and standing query support (at any moment, it is simultaneously executing thousands of queries).

vermontdevil 17y ago

Great we get all of Robert Scoble's posts in high speed.