Enter Live Matrix. It’s a new site that’s just launched (into private beta) with enormous ambitions: to serve as a guide to everything happening online.

“We don’t include anything happening offline,” says co-founder Sanjay Reddy. “We include anything happening online that has a start time.”

Sure enough, Live Matrix has web-based events that include video/TV premieres, audio webcasts, product launches, special sales/auctions, live chats, games and contests, and even things happening in virtual worlds. Live Matrix has a crawler that it uses to extract data from certain web sites, and will also offer tools for anyone else to add events — from a standard Submit form to accepting CSV files and feeds.

“We’re indexing about 80,000 scheduled events per week, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” says co-founder Nova Spivack. “That’s probably only about 20% of what’s out there. We’ll accept listings from the ‘little guys’ and from major sites.”

The Live Matrix interface, in its current form, looks unmistakably like Digg and similar vote-based sites. But on Live Matrix, users vote by RSVPing to attend an event. And yes, the more RSVPs an event gets, the more visibility the event gets on Live Matrix’s platform, which includes its web site search engine, APIs, and widgets. Live Matrix is also working to sign distribution partners.

While Live Matrix may look and act a bit like Digg, its co-founders are more interested in pointing out that it’s a different animal than Clicker, a new guide for online TV and movies.

“Clicker is 99% on-demand video,” Spivack says. “We’re focused on web events, not TV. Clicker is more of a Hulu competitor [than a Live Matrix competitor].”

Spivack and Reddy say that Live Matrix will make money from ads and sponsored listings, and may also offer a paid, premium-style account for publishers that might include advanced analytics both before and after an event takes place. Spivack suggested that Live Matrix could even someday become an ad marketplace around the events it lists.

The site is currently accepting requests for access to its private beta at livematrix.com. Below is a screencast from co-founder Nova Spivack that shows how Live Matrix works.

Here’s a preview of the features from each, along with preliminary medals for search coverage. We’ll see how it stacks up during the games.

Bing: Gold Medal

On the basis of their official partnership with NBCOlympics.com alone, Microsoft takes the top prize, but it’s also well earned because they were first to announce their 2010 Olympic search features. Powered by Microsoft Silverlight, over 400 hours of live event coverage, and 1,000 hours total available of on-demand, streaming video content in HD quality, will be available on both the official NBC Olympics site and on MSN.com

Bing.com is the official search provider for NBCOlympics.com, where Bing will provide Instant Answers for popular athletes, sporting events and medal counts, as well as updating the homepage daily with NBCOlympics.com images.

We can expect to see the same Instant Answers on Bing.com, for both events and athlete searches.

Bing Visual Search (which requires installation of Silverlight) has added two galleries, one for the 86 Olympic events, and the other, a visual search gallery of 664 Olympic athletes. Athlete data is not a complete picture by any means, but it does include more than just Team USA data, and is also sortable by a number of criteria, including age, sport, hometown/country, and will update medal counts on an individual basis. Each athlete has a link to background information, but it will be interesting to see if their profiles will include real-time news reports on any injuries or performance updates.

Bing Video Search also shows some promise, with fresh video content from NBC partners, as well as the ability to sort by other sources including Hulu and Youtube, and narrow results by length and quality:

Bing Video Search Vancouver Olympics

Bing Maps has also created a new application, Winter Games, which will provide real-time information on event venues, medal counts by country, and Winter Games tweets from Vancouver, using their Twitter Maps application to filter out Olympics related commentary.  Bing Maps previously announced StreetSide coverage of Vancouver and Whistler with enhanced imagery of the Olympic scenes in Canada.

Additional real-time results are also promised:

For all 86 Winter Olympic events, NBCOlympics.com on MSN will deliver the fastest and most comprehensive results anywhere online, providing LIVE results as events are happening and offering statistical summaries, group standings, elimination brackets and more.

MSN Mobile and NBC Olympics teamed up to create a variety of mobile apps and results features, more information available at: http://www.nbcolympics.com/mobile/.

Google: Silver

Over at Google, an international landing page has been created to help users Explore the Games with Google, aka, “Google.com/Games10″, with Google Maps being a main component to track medal counts by country, and special “Street View” coverage with the use of a snowmobile to get around the games’ event venues.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Note: Snowmobile imagery of ski runs taken early-December 2009, so it’s not indicative of current snow conditions.

Real-time and Google News Search are two of the more prominent features as well.  A link to the YouTube CTVOlympics channel, promises live video footage from Canada’s Olympic Network. Other suggestions include Picasa image albums and adding the Games Gadget to your iGoogle page.

Yahoo: Bronze

Yahoo has unveiled its official sports site for the games at: http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics

Regular Yahoo search results for Olympics related queries have been enhanced with event information and schedules, athlete profiles, photos and videos blended into the results:

Yahoo! Video Search is jammed packed with 2010 Winter Olympics related (with just a couple slightly unrelated, like Super Mario Bros Olympics for Wii) videos .

Yahoo mobile results are available by going to m.yahoo.com from any mobile device.

Perhaps offering the most fan interaction of the three, Yahoo has created Fancouver, with contests and special features for both online fans and those attending the Olympic Games in Vancouver:

Beginning January 25, 2010, fans can submit their favorite winter sports photos in the “Winter Sports Moment” sweepstakes athttp://sports.yahoo.com/fancouver for a chance to win prizes ranging from digital cameras to a trip to the U.S. Freestyle Skiing Championship held at Squaw Valley, California, in March 2010. Participants are encouraged to share great hockey moments, downhill triumphs, or other thrilling winter sports photos. The sweepstakes is open to residents of the United States and Canada (excluding Quebec).

Yahoo! Turns Vancouver Into FanCouver

On opening day of the games, Yahoo! will unveil FanCouver, an entertainment center where all fans can go to enjoy:

• Live video streaming with “Fan-Cam”
• Free WiFi lounge
• Free hot cocoa bar
• Photo booth
• Pin giveaway, a tradition at the Games
• Appearances by athletes
• Games and giveways

Located in the Yaletown section of Vancouver at 1128 Hamilton Street, FanCouver will be open February 12 through February 28, from 11 a.m. PST to 11 p.m. PST daily.

It’s time again for another roundup of the latest and greatest search tools and search engines, and in this article, I’ll share five such sites that will answer the above questions (and more). This is the fourth in my occasional series profiling under-the-radar search tools. Links to the previous three are at the end of this article.

SearchMuffin

Look, I don’t name ‘em, I just use ‘em and write about ‘em if they’re cool. And this one is. SearchMuffin has a simple premise: Type in a keyword and choose a city from the dropdown menu, and it’ll show you the Google search results that match. Think of it as a sort of geo-targeted competitive research/PPC research tool. It’s about the easiest way I know of to see the PPC ads that appear in other cities. Here’s a screenshot of a search for “anaheim real estate” in Anaheim, even though I’m up in Washington state.

And best of all, it’s not just limited to major U.S. cities; at the moment, there are 262 choices in the dropdown menu, including such non-metropolises as Roseville, California, and Arvada, Colorado. (No disrespect intended to Rosevillites and Arvadians.)

Glearch

Let’s expand our horizons beyond 262 U.S. cities. What if you needed to quickly see some search results from other countries and/or other languages? Glearch (again, I don’t name ‘em) is an international meta search engine that lets you search by country, by language, and/or by search engine. You can take those three options and customize each to build just the query you want.

In the example above, I’m doing a search for the rock band U2, and I’m searching French-language results on the French versions of Google, Yahoo, and Bing. I’m also including local newspapers, too. The search results page has a tab for web results and a tab for news results. The web results page, like any good meta search site, tells you where each listing was found, i.e., “Ranked 1 by Google search” or “Ranked 4 by Yahoo search.”

Roooby

We’ve written a fair amount about real time search in the past few months, but we haven’t focused too much on the visual element — people posting photos and videos of what they’re doing now. Roooby is one of several real time search engines that capture media, but one of the few that surface both photos and videos. (Although, to be frank, Roooby could do a better job of finding videos by scanning sites such as Qik.com, TwitVid.io, and others that host live video.)

Roooby isn’t the only player in this space. TwitCaps, TwitPicGrid, Pingwire, and Twicsy offer similar real time image search engines.

Spezify

Speaking of media and images, here’s the most visual search tool I’ve ever seen: Spezify. The best way I can describe it is a sort of visual meta search engine. It pulls in results from Yahoo, Bing, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and even eBay and Amazon to create a fairly stunning search results page.

This is serious eye candy. There’s a settings page where you can choose the sources and types of content (images, text, video) you want included. But to be frank, the focus on visuals means the search results have no context whatsoever. You can move vertically and horizontally through the results, but you have no idea why you’re seeing what you’re seeing. It’s innovative to be sure, but for this searcher, it’s too lacking in functionality.

Joobili

Finally, here’s one for our readers in Europe, or for our readers traveling to Europe. It’s called Joobili, and it’s a travel/event search engine with a twist: Rather than telling the search engine what you want to do or where you want to go, you tell it when. There’s a cool date-based slider on the home page to get you started, and once you’re in the results, Joobili lets you see results based on categories (Arts, Sport, Nature, etc.), by country, or by keyword.

If you create an account, Joobili will let you save events to a wish list or a “went” list. You can also rank events to help other users make decisions on what to do and where to go. It’s a clever approach, but as I hinted above, it only covers Europe.

See also:

• Another 5 Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should
• 5 (More) Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should
• 7 Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should

Also in this category are Yahoo’s Upcoming, Attendio, Eventful, Citysearch, AOL Cityguide, Going.com and Jambase among others.