Topsy Labs, the startup realtime social search engine has finally found the road to revival, fostering the real-time bandwagon in the search industry. It has managed to raise a funding of $15 million as a part of Series C Round having its investors including BlueRun Ventures, Ignition Partners, Founders Fund and Scott Banister along with Western Technology Investments. Topsy brings its results based on what people are linking to on Twitter, which is not a new concept as OneRiot and Tweetmeme also launched the same social search criterion.

“The structure of the Internet continues to shift from collections of static web documents to networks of people sharing information in realtime. This round of investment will let us expand on our scalable architecture that can ingest and mine massive amounts of social content so we can continue to establish Topsy as the next-generation platform for web search and discovery,” said Vipul Ved Prakash — Co-Founder & CEO of Topsy

So far, Topsy has raised $30 million since its incubation in 2006. Utilizing its funding, the company recently announced two new tools; Topsy Social Modules and Tosy Social Analytics that will help marketers leverage the social web and its potential.  Showing full confidence in the company, John Malloy, Partner at BlueRun Ventures said,

“The rapidly-growing social web is having a major impact on the existing $300 billion search market. With the market consolidation of the last year, Topsy has emerged as the only realtime search architecture capable of becoming a web-scale search platform. We see Topsy as a key innovator in the world of the social web and the next disruptive force in the search market.”

While its funding is a financially good sign for Topsy, it has also managed to defy the Twitter Ecosystem curse. It is now also providing analytics tools for marketers and widgets for publishers including Discovery Communications, IDG Media and The Huffington Post. As social search is becoming important, we also saw an updated product from HootSuite named as “HootSuite Social Analytics“, a powerful analytics tool that will provide much more ways to measure the campaign success, and obtain customizable reports.

As instant search is making industry-wide gains, it has started moving towards the mobile sector. Recently, Google added a new feature called “Instant Previews” as a part of their bigger shift to instant search interaction and results. It has also improved the Google Mini Maps for Chrome with an update on Street Views called Art Project. If Google is pushing an upgrade, how can Microsoft stay behind? Following its competitor, Bing is now also working on a similar feature that reduces the time of the search process.

Getting inspired from instant search, Amazon also implemented the same concept in its website, but unfortunately got slammed by a lawsuit by MasterObjects that offers AJAX and Flash-based software solutions for immediate search results and suggestions. The company said it owns a patent that covers the technology.