Can real-time search make a buck?
The biggest of the independent real-time search engines, OneRiot, restructured its management today and laid off an unknown number of employees, including company co-founder Robert Reich. Kimbal Musk, a serial entrepreneur who served as chief executive, is stepping aside to serve as chairman and making way for longtime president Tobias Peggs to take the lead. The Boulder, Colo. company, which raised $27 million in venture capital, has pioneered real-time search, a way of looking for content that’s hot or trending at any given moment. After launching a consumer-facing search engine in the fall of 2008, it pivoted from being a destination site to becoming a real-time ad network after Google entered the field. It now delivers display ads to about 120 different developer partners that show its search results in their products through a program called RiotWise. The company says it’s now showing 1 billion impressions per month of search ads. Content companies, like ours or The Huffington Pos
