Stream. Insights for Search. Google Social Search is live! Try it now. 26 October '09, 09:57pm Follow Google announced that it was working on this Social Search feature at the Web 2.0 Summit last week, and not a week later the product is available to try. So, how does it work? Using your Google Contacts, Social Search combines results from your friend’s blogs, Twitter, and other public social media sites and lets you combine results from searching those along with Google’s regular search results. To get started, you first have to head over to Google Labs’s experimental section and activate this feature. Once you’ve got Social Search activated, a section of your search results will show “Results from your Social Circle”. At present, while everyone can activate the feature, you might not see it straight away. Better results for you, better results for Google Social Search is definitely a useful addition to Google’s search arsenal for Google itself as well as for users.
Just take a look at the video from Google’s Matt Cutts below. Collecta. Yahoo Launches Slick Desktop AIR App For Monitoring Twitter. Yahoo has launched an Adobe AIR-powered desktop application called Sideline yesterday, once again validating the power of Twitter for real-time search. After taking it for a spin, I have to say it looks and feels really nice, but other than that there’s no real incentive for me to keep using it on a regular basis.
So what does it do? Sideline is a straight-forward Twitter monitoring tool, giving you the opportunity to stay on top of the latest trends on the microsharing service and/or keywords you feed into the application. It has an auto-refresh feature (which you can tweak to have the search results reload between 1 minute and 1 hour), a notification system that alerts you of new keyword mentions in an overlay that appears whatever you’re doing and the ability to only look for favorited tweets containing the keywords you’re tracking. Is Twitter the New Google Alternative? - Search Marketing News Blog - Search Engine Watch (SEW) When searchers can't find something on Google, they might turn to another search engine like Yahoo, Windows Live or Ask. Or they might turn to one of the growing answers sites. Discovering the Power of Twitter's Real-Time Search - ReadWriteWeb.
A-ha moments often come when the conventional method lets you down and you need to try something new. That happened on Saturday when Gmail was unavailable to me for over an hour. The outage was long enough for me to have to set up a Yahoo Mail account to send an urgent email. I also used Basecamp to communicate with my ReadWriteWeb colleagues; through that, I learned that Gmail was fine for them. So I started my research online to see what was happening. Google Search for "Gmail Down" Was Not Helpful One of the queries I used on Google was "Gmail outage," but "Gmail down" is how most people report problems. Twitter Search Scores Searching "Gmail down" on Twitter gave me much more useful data. Twitter is simply a better medium in which to report that "Gmail is down.
" Twitter search does not have any built-in latency. What was even more powerful was getting replies from people I don't know who had the same problem, or variations of the problem. Is This an Isolated Case? ChaCha Search - Connect and search with a live ChaCha Guide | Home.