Sency real-time search engine gains some momentum, founder still abroad

Update: Corrected details about features that have been added by Sency since a conversation in October.
It was mid-October that we first heard about real-time search engine Sency, when the Inquirer’s Joe DiStefano first wrote about the business, a virtually-located company with plans to move to Philadelphia, founder Evan Britton told DiStefano.
Sency collects real-time data from Twitter, but differentiates itself from Twitter’s search by filtering spam and pulling the most popular links being shared on the microblogging service. Sency also lets publishers have a very basic, yet customizable widget with real-time search results on their Web sites.
We caught up with Britton when he was in town for the World Series, a trip he made from the West Coast to see one of the memorable games. “I miss my sports teams, friends and family and the city. Being away from Philly made me realize how much I love it,” he told us in a telephone interview then.
Britton, who grew up in Lafayette Hill, says he is still assessing a move to the city, citing personal reasons. But despite relocation plans being postponed, over the last few months, the real-time search engine has seen growth, Britton says.

Traffic topped out at 50,000 unique visitors and over 100,000 page views in the last 30 days, an improvement since it launched in August, he says. “This is something that’s just starting to roll. When we first got [press coverage], we were doing about 50 visitors a day,” he said today, after pulling up analytics data during a telephone call with Technically Philly.
Britton attributes some of the growth to recent press, like a guest post on BusinessInsider about real-time search, which is not without its bias. In the post, Britton calls his site one of five real-time search engines startups to watch. Of course, Sency faces tough competition in the market. VentureBeat wrote about 11 real-time search contenders in June�before Sency launched�such as Collecta and Scoopler, which like Sency, return microblogging search results.
Like real-time engines TweetMeme and Topsy, Sency, too, offers the ability to see links that are generating buzz on Twitter. A user can search a query and see links that are replicated on the microblogging service. It’s a clever feature, one that keeps Sency relevant. But is it enough?
When Technically Philly spoke to Britton in October, we mentioned our doubts about some of the limited functionality of the search engine. We wondered why the site only pulls up a limited number of search results, and about the basic functionality of its embeddable widget.
Britton was accepting of the criticism, noting that the company had chosen to only return a limited number of results, for sake of displaying timely information. He also said that bloggers have asked Sency to not change its widget’s basic and white-label functionality.
Of course, the market has since become crowded by a bigger player. Last week, Google announced its move into real-time search, cataloguing Twitter and FriendFeed updates beside blog posts and news published moments before.
It seems that Sency’s aim is to keep things simple, to create a “good business,” as Britton told us in October. But it will need to step up its game to become a major player in real-time search.