Thought this is worth a mention ... Whostalkin, is a new social search engine (http://www.whostalkin.com/). It searches conversations from many of the major social search engines.

Quick post on Joongel (www.joongel.com), a meta search engine that aggregates and searches the ten most popular sites in many categories, including:

1. Images
2. Music
3. Videos
4. Shopping
5. Social
6. Q & A
7. Health
8. Torrents
9. Gossip

I like how Joongel lists the sources they search; this is helpful to know, and it can actually help you find new sources to monitor. Thus far, I've found Joongel valuable for scoping out topics and doing preliminary research; I usually like to use advanced search facilities on the individual search engines or online services when I'm working on a project. Joongel offers a web-based search on their site, as well as desktop and browser plugin versions.

I've bookmarked Joongel and will no doubt use them again.  

OK, so it is still an alpha product ... however, Me.dium still is worth a look for their social search that taps into their main product's data. While it is not comprehensive, it could be another tool for monitoring "buzz" on the internet. Basically your search results are influenced by what people are currently browsing/searching on the internet ... if a topic is popular, it will appear higher in the search results. Read more about the release of this engine at: (Me.dium press release) and search/try the service at: http://me.dium.com/search. Note that Me.dium also uses Yahoo's BOSS (build your own search service) api for content ... hopefully Yahoo will be able to remain independant of Google so they can continue to provide these tools.

Just checked out Iterend (http://blogs.iterend.com/en/), a new search engine (currently) focussing on Blogs. They're still in private beta, and it looks like their index is not quite that large, but I found what was retrieved by my sample searches to be relevant. They also have the standard tag cloud, as well as categories for the blogs. Of particular interest to reputation and media monitoring companies is the API, which allows you to integrate Iterend's results into a custom application.

If they can make sure their final index is not full of duplicate and spammy entries, they'll have a nice contender for blog search.  

VideoSurf, a new video search engine is currently in beta at: http://www.videosurf.com/ .

This site offers many features:

• Ability to start videos at certain segments
• Searches multiple video sources (Google, YouTube, MySpace, etc.)
• Short text description included
• Ability to run alerts against search strings

This is another site to watch ... video search needs improvement.

Read about "The State of the BlogSphere 2008", a report compiled by Technorati at: http://www.technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/ .

Social media searchers have another tool in Social Mention (http://www.socialmention.com/). Social Mention has tabs for searching blogs, mico-blogs, bookmarks, comments, events, images, news and videos. They search web properties such as: Google blog search, Twitter, Delicious, FriendFeed, Flickr, Digg, YouTube and many others. Searching is via a simple search box, and advanced search options are available. Of particular interest is the availability of an API; media monitoring companies may be able to tap into Social Mention's database to search for further analysis.

Overall, this could develop into a good tool; I'd like to see a search option that combines all of the tabs. 

While I don't "tweet" quite a few others do ... so if you're looking to monitor social media, you'll want to search Twitter as well. Luckily Twitter has a nice (free) API for searching their db. Access it at: http://search.twitter.com/api.

Cognition, a NLP and Semantic search company announced Tuesday that they could map more than 10 million semantic connections, enabling them to help other companies build search engines that "understand" the query. This is a company and technology to watch; they offer API access to their system to help developers build "web 3.0" tools. Check them out at: http://www.cognition.com/.

 

 

It is nice to see that a few companies continue to try to improve the user search experience. Just checked out Omgili, a social search engine that covers product review sites, mailing lists, discussion forums ... basically it is a vertical search engine for many types of user generated content. They claim to crawl over 100,000 individual sites. They also have some basic graphing tools in their advanced section to help users track "buzz". In addition, Omgili also provides API access for companies wishing to integrate Omgili results into their own systems.

Overall, I found Omgili to be a useful tool ... it is one of the few search engines that actually index product reviews and discussion forums ... I hope they're able to continue to improve upon their search engine.

 

 

Quick post for a Saturday morning ... I just read about BlinkX's API offering, which the call "Red Label". They provide both a hosted solution, or an XML API solution, allowing you to freely (up to about 10,000 / queries per day ... if you have more, then you'll need to negotiate with BlinkX). Currently, BlinkX searches over 26 million videos and they also index selected audio sites as well.

Read more about the BlinkX Red Label program at: http://www.blinkx.com/redlabel/introduction .

 

 

This past week, Twitter acquired Summize (now located at: search.twitter.com). Read the official release here: http://blog.twitter.com/2008/07/finding-perfect-match.html. We'll see how this goes ... certainly all of social media needs better search tools; hopefully Twitter will devote some resources to improving the search interface.