Oneupweb have carried out an eye-opening eye-tracking study into the effectiveness of real-time web search results. The study split a group of users into “consumers” searching for products you would consider buying or “foragers” looking for current news and information on a topic. The results were mixed to say the least:

73% had never heard of real-time results before participating this study.

Only a quarter of the consumers cared for the real-time results compared to 47% of the information foragers.

The report also showed the users took more than ten seconds to to settle their gaze on the real-time results, but the foragers were more willing to spend time on the page which could be indicative of their willingness to consider more options before clicking and hence their increased likelihood to test the real-time results.

So the results perhaps don’t show real-time search to be quite as popular as the buzz may suggest – not yet anyway, but as users adapt the social aspect of search will become ever more relevant as real-time becomes a reality.

Outsell picks up on the recent Nielsen blog post Changing Model: A Global Perspective on Paying for Online Content, which investigates whether consumers will be willing to pay for online news content. This study matches previous findings from Forrester and Outsell’s own research, essentially that when it comes to media content consumers seem less willing to pay for news than other types of media.

Such findings lead Outsell to conclude that consumers have been conditioned to spend on particular content at particular price points, and that household budgets are pretty fixed. Would you be prepared to cancel that ESPN TV subscription to pay for access to your local newspaper online? So rather than expecting a change in business models to be the next big thing, Outsell suggests publishers place more focus on “serious product design, user engagement, and the things that delight and differentiate”.

Certainly food for thought, as the recession eases and ad spending looks to be slowly bouncing back will the trend toward paywalls lose some momentum?

Over the past few months we have been particularly busy growing our coverage of news and social media sources, with much more still to come in the New Year. The UGC Metabase now serves around 750k posts a day from our spam-free White List of social media sites. This represents a 200% increase in volume from earlier in the year, and coverage has now jumped to 435k feeds watched with a further increase due by year-end. Coverage has particularly been boosted over platforms like Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and Wikipedia to deliver a rich and diverse range of social media sources now being watched, along with other microblogging platforms, consumer reviews, forums, Q&A sites and more. We have also increased the number of social media feeds with geotagging, so users can now easily list and organise sources by nationality and region.

On the News Metabase side of things we now index over half a million news articles a day from 32k sources, a twenty percent increase in recent months. Other improvements to the news side include enhancing the way we identify and tag article authors and recently growing the number of news categories available to 800. The full complement of news feeds can be seen here : http://w.moreover.com/public/free-rss/prebuilt-feeds.html

We’d love to hear any queries or reactions to these changes, so feel free to drop us a line below!

Mashable have published a piece on how news outfits are really running with this new feature, such as creating staff lists and gathering registers on favoured Twitterers. The New York Times staff list, already including 96 staffers, looks like a great resource for finding insightful tweets plus shows the NYT understands the boundaries between traditional news and social media are increasingly blurred.

In the UK The Guardian has created a handy list of Members of Parliament, so if you want to quiz your local MP on their expenses the Guardian’s list could be a good place to find them! Similarly CNN has curated a list featuring politicians involved in November 3 elections.

Any other particularly noteworthy news lists out there? The value seems to lie in creating filtered, specific lists that can that provide relevant information without all the noise and for the publisher there is always the potential to drive more traffic to their site.

So with that, I’ll direct to the original piece by Chris here, and recommend you follow his further musings on the matter via Twitter @cjahearn (not forgetting if you want the very latest from us at Moreover be sure to follow @moreovertech).