6 Social Search Engines to Start 2009 | Online Marketing Blog

There are many reasons to search social media including monitoringfor brand and reputation management purposes. Smart online marketershave also been using social search for other reasons includingcompetitive research and opportunistic content marketing through socialkeyword trends.

Most advice on how companies should be listening to the social webwith minimal cost involves monitoring individual services, which isinefficient.  Premium social media monitoring services do this muchmore effectively but can be expensive.  Here are 6 free social searchtools that may help small businesses make their initial foray intosearching the social web more productive while keeping costs to aminimum.  

Delver isa “socially connected” search tool in alpha, that is based on yourfriends influence on content, i.e. drawing upon the “wisdom of crowds”to filter the universe of search content. You first identify yoursocial profiles and can then add more specific information to thenidentify your own social graph. Facebook is emphasized. Search resultsare then influenced by your network.  If Google ever buys Facebook thenthis service might be an attractive target.

WhosTalkin? not to be confused with “Who U Stalkin”, is a social media search tool by Joe Hallthat allows users to search for conversations around topics ofinterest.  Queries are performed against all sources but you can searchon specific social services organized by: Blogs, News, Networks,Videos, Images, Forums and Tags.  The list of practicing SEOs that betatested this tool includes some genuine smarties so this one may beworth watching since saved searches, RSS feeds and other features foundin the tools below are not yet rolled out.

Samepointis a social conversation search engine that segments search by: SocialMentions, Discussion Points, Bookmarks, Wikis, Network,s B2B Networks,Groups, Life Casting, MicroBlogs, Reviews, Podcasts, Documents, Video,Images, News and Web or all.  Each search result extracts sentinmentand keywords as well. In fact, there’s a trending social searchterm page which I think is very interesting.  The Discussion Pointsfeature is interesting because it shows the most commented content inthe search results according to your query and the number of sources.

socialmentionallows you to search a term on specific categories of the social webincluding:  Blogs, Microblogs, Bookmarks, Comments, Events, Images,News, Video or All. There’s also a Social Rank score based on thenumber of mentions every 4 weeks and you can subscribe to searchresults via RSS.

Serph,from ACS, has been around for several years and searches on blog searchengines, social news and bookmarking websites such as Bloglines, Digg,Google Blog Search, YouTube, Topix, Sphere, Yahoo Answers, Flickr andDelicious. Serph is a bit slow but can be useful to cross check querieswith other services and you can subscribe to search results via RSS.

OneRiotis a bit like Delver in that it uses your social network to influencethe search universe for your query but takes heavy consideration ofwhat’s currently popular within your network when sorting searchresults.  Topics that are “emerging” or “surging” are indicated as suchin the search results. OneRiot is alpha at the moment, but has promise.

Nearly all social media monitoring tools are keyword based and usesome kind of crawler or data aggregator to harvest information and thenvarious schemes to organize and sort as search results or monitoringreports.  Each social search tool has unique features, whether it’scrawling the social web at large or filtering by your network. One ormore of the 6 tools above might be right for you to start trackingconversations about your company, brands and even your competition.

From a marketing standpoint, social search tools like those abovecreate additional content and marketing opportunity discovery optionsfor real-time situations, that most standard search engines can’tcompete with.

There have been numerous efforts made with tools like Custom Google Search Engines, Yahoo Pipes and home grown programming to create low cost or free social search tools, but what other free tools have you found to be effective at searching multiple sources of social content on the web?