Recently I’ve been experimenting with a couple of new social search engines. The three I’ve found most useful are OneRiot, SamePoint, and SocialMention. All have their strengths and weaknesses but don’t quite give me what I am looking for to help a businesses connect with potential customers more efficiently.
The one that is closest to what I’m looking for is OneRiot. It appears that you can type in a term and using their Pulse search function you are provided with a snapshot of who is talking about the subject matter you are looking for. However, the data provided does not tell much other than who is talking about the subject matter, the quantity and where. For business purposes, it is important to know quantity of mentions on specific terms and the web properties like, Twitter, Digg, etc. but also to understand the influence factor of who is saying what. I know that to accomplish that has to be very difficult algorythmic wise. But, this is something that many of the search monitoring tools like Sysomos, Radian6 and ScoutLabs have figured out.
OneRiot’s design is very clean and user-friendly as well as SocialMention. SamePoint, needs better design but usability wise seems to have everything laid out ok. Both, SocialMention and SamePoint are going for the vertical search approach i.e. Blog, MicroBlogs, Networks, etc. This is cool if you’re trying to measure these categories however, if you are a company looking for efficiency and where best to engage in conversation you want to go where the people are.
In terms of Search vs. Software Monitoring tools, meaning social search engines compared to social monitoring software tools, right now I would lean more toward the tools. I currently don’t see the capability with any of the engines to set queries that I’ve done in order to keep the data flowing to me. Further, how as a business could I continue to grow a knowledgebase for specific business use.
Seems to be more about the business model? Search is more about find things quickly and to me social search should be more about finding people and what they’re involved in. How influential are they? What are they involved in? What determines their rank? Ok, so how are these people ranked just as in key terms in regular search?
Right now, if you do a search in OneRiot for “economist” you get an article returned for The Economist on Purchasing Power, The Big Mac index. OK?
The article has received 2,465 Total Shares: 1880 Diggs, 252 Tweets, and 333 OneRiot Shares. This tells me that this article has basically been shared a lot or Dugg alot. Doing the same query on Social Mention in “All” crashes. Doing the query in “Blogs” returns an NYTimes article about German Business Confidence being up. And, SamePoint returns a wikipedia article on the general overview of what an economist is.
Are you thinking what I am? How do I use these engines to my benefit? What do you think about where social search should be going?
