3 Real-Time Search Engines Discover Social Media Trends

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Google and Yahoo transformed how we find information. But now social media is creating real-time content that requires special search engines.

As online publishing platforms and social networks have exploded in popularity, there is a new need to aggregate and search the dynamic “real-time” web.

New platforms hold much promise for marketers who want to understand trends and customer problems in real time. In this article I review three of the top real-time search engines (in no particular order), and each has a unique profile that fits certain use cases particularly well.

#1: OneRiot

OneRiot is the largest real-time web search engine today. It aggregates information about popular topics from Twitter and other social media sites.

OneRiot consolidates all these articles into one headline that you can click that leads you to a list of articles associated with a topic. This is a great way to see multiple articles on one topic all at once and in real time.

Instead of having to search different news sites looking for a hot topic, users can access OneRiot’s aggregated real-time information on the topic. Also, OneRiot does a good job of blending hot topics from different spheres. It has a balanced mix of entertainment news and hard news, but seems to concentrate more on entertainment news.

OneRiot has a bar on the right side of the page that breaks common topics into categories. If you’re looking for the latest news on trends or culture, politics or technology, you can easily find it.

Though OneRiot focuses on news organization sources and provides more reliable information, it lacks the personal touch from integrating commentary from individuals into the feed. This eliminates how the public is reacting to the news. OneRiot is great for lists of news articles related to the topic, but it’s important to get the public’s take on these articles as well.

The best way to use OneRiot for online marketing would be to use its search results about important topics. You could give your audience up-to-date information aggregated from multiple social networks. For instance, if you sell cars, linking to the OneRiot results page with the latest information about models you sell could be a great way to display feedback for people who own your cars.

By going to OneRiot, you can quickly see what the most frequently posted information is at the moment. Overall, OneRiot has the potential to be a great source for generating organic leads.

OneRiot’s real-time results display information about the first person to tweet a story, up-to-date news coverage and social media commentary on those news items.

#2: Collecta

Collecta has more of a mainstream U.S. and international news focus, and does not offer the entertainment and lifestyle content that OneRiot integrates into its results. As a result, Collecta is a great source for people who want important news stories and like to view several sources to understand the breadth of angles on a topic.

The main page displays a general headline for each topic and then three suggested articles related to the topic. This makes it easy to read and gives it a professional, news-style approach. Also, Collecta does a great job of gathering recent social media updates from several sites such as WordPress, Digg and niche blogs; whereas OneRiot seems to pull most of its content from Twitter.

Collecta aggregates multiple sources and displays them based on recentness. There is the option to filter results based on the sources of data you want to include in the results.

Though Collecta does a good job at pulling information from multiple sources, its user interface makes it somewhat difficult to see the information it’s pulling from Twitter and other social media sites. The first suggested article on the homepage is usually an article related to a popular topic, but the next two subheadlines are the newsfeeds for the various social media sites discussing the topic.

The best way to use Collecta for online marketing would be to scan a variety of social media sites updated with the latest information on your business and industry within seconds. Collecta maintains a newsfeed that is updated by the second with several personal and professional social media accounts listed. This is a great way for marketers to research how the public is responding to a topic in real time.

#3: 48ers

48ers focuses more on the collective reactions of individuals to news events in real time. The site is great if you’re searching for keywords and want to see what people are discussing about a certain topic. For example, during the eggs recall you could enter a search for “eggs” and see the discussion on all social media sites about eggs.

The tradeoff here is that if you aren’t aware of a particular topic, you don’t know to search for it to explore it further. Twitter and Google have both overcome this problem by adding trending results and searches. The main page of 48ers is set up almost like Google where you type in one word and review the results. The difference is that 48ers results are social media results, not news articles or irrelevant articles about eggs from last year.

This is a great source for viewing the most up-to-date information on a particular topic, but it isn’t great if you don’t know what everyone is already talking about. OneRiot and Collecta are superior to 48ers in this respect because they offer the functionality of 48ers while also offering suggested hot topics.

48ers has a more streamlined interface than either Collecta or OneRiot, but it also integrates multiple data sources and offers the ability to filter results based on source.

The best way to use this site for online marketing is to analyze a larger number of social media results on a particular topic and discover brand mentions or industry discussions. Results are being pulled by the second and you have a lot more content to work with compared to the suggested social media results from OneRiot and Collecta.

The Final Word

All three profiled real-time search engines offer benefits, and it’s not clear who will plug the holes in their service first and offer the most compelling real-time search offering.

These independent companies are also competing with Google, Facebook, Twitter and other larger companies that are offering some version of real-time search and actively seeking to improve them.

Have you used real-time search engines? Do you think they hold promise? Let me know your thoughts in the box below.

Tags: google, information, search engines, yahoo

Announcing “Launch Your Awesomeness”

July 15, 2010 by Francisco Rosales
Filed under Blog, launch your awesomeness, launch your blog in only 48 hours, thesis, wordpress

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SocialMouths - Launch Your Awesomeness SocialMouths is turning one year and to celebrate, I’m launching my first product.

It’s called “Launch Your Awesomeness – Your own kick-ass blog in only 48 hours” and I would absolutely love it if you can take a couple of minutes to read this post to understand what it is, why I created it, for who and how you can hopefully benefit from it.

Also, I’m leaving the comments open if you want to give me feedback, if you have some ideas to improve it or to simply ask questions.

So What Is It?

It’s a packaged solution to speed up the process of launching your blog, a successful one, either for your business or for your own personal brand.

I figured that every new blogger needs 5 essential elements to have any chance to success:

Full control. In other words, eliminate the webmaster
A kick-ass first impression, which today means a few seconds
Some SEO basics to be search engine friendly and don’t invisible
Social media integration to amplify the message
And traffic analysis for better performance

So I came up with a solution that provides all that by implementing the necessary tools. Your blog is ready to perform at its best and at the same time, I’m eliminating the learning curve. These tools I’m talking about include WordPress, Thesis, Disqus comments, Tweetmeme buttons, sharing systems like ShareThis, Facebook and Twitter widgets and others. These are the tools you have already seen being used by successful bloggers out there.

A true powerhouse, ready for you to come in and start dropping your awesome content.

Also, I have put together a couple of designs so you can pick your choice. The trick here was to create something that looks good and at the same time it’s simple enough to be usable in any kind of business or industry. You can’t just base your online presence on good design BUT (notice I used the big “but”…), don’t you agree that a decent design build that initial trust any website needs? I thought so, you have been in that situation when you hit the back button in a matter of seconds too, right?

What’s NOT

It’s not a WordPress “Premium Theme”. Period.

Who Is This For?

Well, being an entrepreneur myself, I understand beginnings are not easy specially in the financial department. This means that while we’re looking to launch something of quality, we don’t always have the necessary budgets and resources to build from scratch. I see this with some of my clients. Launch Your Awesomeness is a solution for those people.

The reason I didn’t conduct a survey to have a more crowdsourcing approach to the whole thing, which is something I plan to do in the future, is because I had already enough feedback from over a year of working with clients. I have listened carefully all this time to the needs and objectives of people launching their first blog, redesigning an existing one or even going for a second one.

This Is Your Chance

If you have been postponing the launch of your blog because you didn’t have enough money, you didn’t know how to implement all that technology or your cat is looking at you weird, this is your chance to stop those excuses that build up an unreal sense of fear in you and… Launch Your Awesomeness!

Go visit the site at LaunchYourAwesomeness.com

Thank you!

You still there? Go!