|
|
|
|
|
Search Engine News
Top 5 sites for social search
Mon Nov 2, 2009
What kind of sites came into consideration for this short list of great social search engines? I have not been looking at sites that simply index social networks. I’m not looking for simply for information from social networks. I want search tools for general web search powered by information from social networks. The sites on this list all search information that has been recommended by someone, and to some degree this recommendation influences the way the search results are listed. This brand of search engine give you search results that appeal to real people, not just search engine spiders. And the winners are: Delicious Delicious is a social bookmarking site, not a search engine. So what is it doing topping a list like this? Delicious is the world’s largest social bookmarking site. This means it is in essence a collection of web sites that have been hand picked by real people, then categorized and annotated for your convenience. Why Yahoo (who owns Delicious) have not made better use of this fantastic resource for their regular web search engine, I will never understand. However, about a year ago, the search options inside Delicious were upgraded. You can search
The search engine will suggest queries as you type and you can filter your search results by tag or by the age of the bookmark. The search results show the most popular tags associated with it and how many Delicious members have bookmarked a site. If you click on the field indicating the number of bookmarks for a particular link, you are presented with a list showing who has added the bookmark, what tags they have used and — this is very convenient — short summaries or notes that users may choose to add to their bookmarks. This all ads up to make Delicious a great research tool. OneRiot OneRiot is a search engine for the real time web, which also makes it a social search engine — social media is what constitutes the real time web. It crawls the links people share on social networks (mostly Twitter and Digg), then indexes the content on those pages. This way, OneRiot is a great way to find really fresh content. It is also easy to determine how real people respond to or view current events. But people don’t just share news on social networks. They share whatever they find useful. And with all of the millions of people submitting their links to Twitter and Digg, OneRiot’s index contains hand picked sites on most aspects of human life. Each search result contains a title, excerpt URL along with info on which social network it was submitted to, how many times the link has been shared and by whom, when it was last shared and even who shared it first. The default search present the the most “socially valued” content as related to your query — a ranking that takes into account the number of shares, rate of shares, and several other determining factors. You can choose to present real time results instead. This way you get the freshest content. StumbleUpon StumbleUpon was conceived as a network for recommending and discovering interesting web sites. After a re-launch recently, there is now an added focus on search features. The search box is not prominent on the main page, but the search engine is quite powerful: It searches an index comprised of pages recommended by StumbleUpon’s 8.5 Mill members. You can search the entire index or narrow the search to your own favorites or the favorites of your friends. StumbleUpon also suggests ways to narrow your search. A great bonus on StumbleUpon is the fact that members are encouraged to contribute a review of the site when they add it to the index. Most search have one or more review. Browsing these reviews is a good way to decide which search result are the best. Scoopler Scoopler is another real-time search engine. We reviewed Scoopler when they launched back in May and liked it a lot. Since then they have come a long way: They have added features and landed funding. Scoopler indexes sites like Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Delicious and more. When you search for a topic on Scoopler, the search results in the middle column give you the most relevant results for your query from among the links submitted to the indexed services. You can choose to view all content or to filter by media type: Video, links or images. In the right column you get real time posts — the most recent items on Twitter, Delicious etc that contain your query. Real time channels is the newest feature. This is a bar right above the search box, linking to predefined categories: entertainment, technology, sports, world & business, science, gaming, politics, and lifestyle. Even though these categories might not appeal to everyone, they demonstrate the wealth of information that Scoopler makes available. It is for broad queries Scoopler really proves its worth. Google Social Search Google Social Search is an experiment on Google Labs. To use it, you need to switch it on from the Google Experimental page. You also need a public Google Profile. Once you have one, you can add your social networks to your profile like I have done in my Google profile. Google then proceeds to index your profile and the links to your social network. If the thought of his freaks you out (like Dan Costa at PCMag), rest assured that the whole process is opt-in. If you choose to opt in, Google will index the networks you have added to your profile — your friends and their friends for an extended social circle, as Google calls it. If you use Google Reader, results from the RSS streams will also be added to your social search results when relevant. The social search results are delivered (when Google’s algorithm deems it appropriate) at the bottom of the regular search results page, clearly marked. It is too early to say yet if Google Social Search will add much value for most web searchers, but if Google makes good use of this huge reservoir of systematized information, it certainly could. Here is a short intro: And here is an explanation of how it works:
More Articles
|
|
Social search is web search aided in some way by social networks. Google (NSDQ:GOOG) launched its own social search last week. Who else is on this scene and how can social search help you find what you are looking for?
