Tag Archives: real-time

Real-Time Social Media Search

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Posted in Business Information, News, Search, Social media and tagged , ,

At one point in time, there were a number of sites trying to provide search to information as it came whistling by on social media streams.  Most of them have gotten out of the business or, if they have a social search, it’s not necessarily that current.  Kurrently caught my eye because it seems to provide a fast rolling response to any search you put into it.  It retrieves messages posted to Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

To be honest, I was a bit skeptical so I put in a hashtag that I was following on Twitter and watched the search results on Twitter and the stream on Kurrently.  At least in this case, Kurrently was displaying results before Twitter was, although it was a matter of a few minutes so it may have just been a matter of freshening my browser.

Kurrently.com showing latest results on #reinventlaw hashtag

Kurrently.com showing latest results on #reinventlaw hashtag

Kurrently can filter out messages from any one of the three buckets it is monitoring, so you can limit the stream to just Facebook or Google.  You can also speed up or slow down the stream, in case it’s roaring past or just dripping like water torture.  You can also bookmark your search term – just as you can by bookmarking a search on Twitter – so it would be relatively easy to create a folder of saved topics.  However, since the whole goal is to see what’s happening at the moment, I’m not sure bookmarking on Kurrently makes a whole lot of sense.

I’m adding Kurrently to my toolkit when I want to watch a broad topic that is likely to be discussed in more than one of the main social media locations, or as a quick dive into a discussion or for a sense of sentiment.

Social Distraction

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Posted in Bing, Business Information, Google, Social media and tagged , , , ,

Web search is a cornerstone of online legal research.   Google, Yahoo!, and Bing remain starting points for lawyers and others to perform research outside of the fee-based providers.  Both Google and Bing have put additional social elements into their search engine results pages (SERP).  These are intended to both float up results that are included in social networks and that may be more timely.  They are also part of increasing shifts towards providing personalized search results, with Google mining information based on your Google account, and Bing latching on to your Facebook account, if you link it to your search account.

Unfortunately, searchers seem to be resistant to these changes.  There is good reason.  First, relevant social results require linkages to your social accounts.  People participate in a social network for a variety of reasons, but it does not necessarily mean that those messages are more relevant.  In particular, if your social networks are not related to your research – personal v. professional, for example – they may bear no relation to the topic you are interested in.

Another challenge is that personalized results re-order the results to attempt to fit your previous search activities.  If you search across a variety of areas, or mix personal and professional search within the same account, you may find the custom results page is submerging relevant results.  You can turn personalized search off in Google – or keep your account unlinked from Facebook in Bing – but otherwise you can find your results skewed.  Personalized search may bring some benefits, like the recent addition of search into your Google Mail and Drive contents, but it changes your research.

Bing has seen its search market share drop after introducing social search into their results.  Google has had negative reaction to its implementation as well.  Legal researchers need to watch for how personalization can impact their search.  If you have the need to search social results – blog, Twitter, or that sort of information – you are probably better using a social search engine like Topsy.

Searching Social Content Specifically

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Posted in Business Information, News, Social media and tagged , ,

You can search social media sites like Twitter or Facebook using a variety of tools, both their internal search tools as well as external ones like Topsy.com or FBsearch.us.  Another external search tool I recently came across is Social Mention.  Social Mention distinguishes itself by allowing you to focus your search narrowly on types of social content: comments, social bookmarks, or blogs, for example.

Which Way the Wind Blows

It is also different because it attempts to provide sentiment analysis.  Your search results return like any typical search engine, date ranked, listed in the center of the page.  On the left-hand side, you see the difference.

First, you can immediately see how many contributors are talking about your search query and when the last mention was made.  You can also see whether the trend of discussion is positive, neutral, or negative.  This doesn’t seem to be entirely accurate, so consider it the same way you consider the warning flags in your favorite online legal research citator.   You can click on the word negative to focus your search on just those type of results.

Save Your Search

Social Mention has the relatively unusual ability to save your search results as a downloadable spreadsheet.  Once you have run a search – and applied a filter, like source filtering or sentiment filtering to show only positive results – you can select one of the comma-separated value (CSV) links on the right hand side.  The spreadsheet contains a dozen rows, including title, description, and source.  This may be an easier way of handling your search results – you can sort by the author, for example – than paging through results on the Web site.

Social search remains somewhat limited.  While social media generates a huge amount of content, if you are looking for specific authors or individuals, you may not find them using social tools.  Social Mention does not appear to index any Facebook content, which is one of the best locations for litigators to find information.  But it can be an invaluable source for lawyers and librarians who are involved in business development efforts and current awareness on firm clients.

More Realtime Search While Mobile

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Posted in Android, BlackBerry, Business Information, iPad, iPhone, Mobile, Search, Twitter and tagged , , , ,

Topsy.com is one of the best real-time search tools available.  It is one of the last still standing, surviving Google’s own realtime search effort, and third parties like Collecta.  A search on Topsy will return results from blogs, Twitter, and Google Plus (Google+).

Techcrunch reported this week that Topsy has launched a mobile site, at http://m.topsy.com.  This is a great complement to their normal Web site search, making it easy to quickly look up an expert or discussion even when you don’t have access to your computer.

 

Searching Social Media with Topsy

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Posted in Bookmarklet, Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, RSS, Safari, Search, Social media and tagged , ,

Finding social media messages is a challenge.  This seems to be particularly true when sifting through the information overload that is Twitter, whose own search engine seems perpetually unable to return relevant results.  It was ameliorated by Google and other realtime search, which would let you reach back beyond the last week or two and see relevant messages in the past.  As each of these realtime search tools goes offline, however, it becomes harder to dig into Twitter’s past.

The New York Times’ Gadgetwise blog has a good suggestion in Topsy.  I mentioned Topsy briefly a few months ago but it is worth taking another look at this tool.  Even forgetting the fact that it is a much stronger search engine than Twitter’s own, it has some other features that make it a good draw.

Researchers will like its advanced search template.  You can specifically include or exclude words, and you can search for posts by a particular user or over a particular time frame.

One feature I like is that Topsy recognizes Twitter messages that link to other content.  If you are looking for messages that link to content posted on www.fictionaldomain.com, you can restrict the search to looking just at messages that link to that site.

Topsy also has an Experts search option.  If you are looking for an individual who is knowledgeable on a particular topic, you can search the experts section and it will return Twitter accounts that are frequently cited by other Twitter accounts for that topic.

It’s not exactly a citation index but it can give you some starting points if you are trying to identify expertise.  It is also not necessarily current.  The expert profiles are drawn from Twitter’s information, and you may want to visit a Twitter account profile to verify that the information is current.

Last but not least, Topsy supports RSS feeds for specific topics and experts.

Realtime Search Diminished with Google’s Departure

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Posted in Google, Search, Social media, Twitter and tagged

Google has shuttered its Twitter-oriented search focused search, known as Google Realtime. The search was helpful because it retrieved more results than the default Twitter search, and included a timeline. You could quickly move through, and change, the results by focusing on a particular time. This was helpful for business intelligence (finding a Tweet sent out chronologically near to an event) as well as being a useful filter. Search Engine Land reports that Google’s contract with Twitter ended. You can still search Twitter messages by using Google Social Search but it’s not nearly as powerful and retrieves far more cluttered results. You can focus the search on Twitter (add site:twitter.com to your search) but it does not retrieve all possible matches. A search on Twitter.com itself also has some strange limitations. You can scroll through all of the posts of an individual to find a message. I was able to scroll back through my own messages today, but when I chose an early one (late 2009 was early for me), the search term wouldn’t retrieve the message. I suppose I will be returning to my other Twitter archive tools, like Visitmix’s Archivist, as a way to capture information for future use. Perhaps this is just a lull before we start to see some new, interesting ways of mining social information again.

Real Time Search Changing

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Posted in Collecta, Search, Social media, Twitter and tagged

Collecta is now completely gone, restructuring in a new direction.  It was my favorite of the realtime search engines, pulling back Twitter messages and a variety of other social media resources.  By all accounts, there are high expectations for what their return will bring, based on the success of the original.

Google has renamed its Twitter-oriented search from Updates to Realtime, which makes sense.  When you search Google, you can select Realtime from the left hand menu (sometimes it is hidden even when there are matches) and it will display matching Twitter messages (tweets).  The results have been reformatted, so now you have the timeline broken out to the right with the search results running down the middle of the page.

Searching Google for Realtime Results

Topsy is a nice alternative to Google, enabling you to display bunches of results based on time – past day, 10 days, month, year, etc. – and search results represent more than just the text of the tweets.  If a message linked to another page, you get that link, not the shortened link, to follow.

It looks like realtime search, such as it is, remains primarily an alternative way to search Twitter.  Here’s hoping that whatever Collecta comes up wiith, it focuses on realtime!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/mashable/20110119/tc_mashable/startup_collecta_shuts_down_its_product_starts_working_on_a_new_one