Phil Bradley's weblog

Tinker? Stinker more like!

Tinker. is a new search engine that promises to provide us with the latest news on what people are Twittering. It's got a nice feature in that you can embed a widget on your site and allow people to tweet in your event stream. That's quite good. However, as a search tool it's pretty dire to be honest. Let's take a look at what information Tinker is giving me and compare it to a direct Twitter search for the same subject:

Most recent tweet from Tinker on Chrome OS: 20 minutes ago
Most recent tweet from Twitter on Chrome OS: 10 seconds ago

Most recent tweet from Tinker on Arctic Monkeys: 22 minutes ago
Most recent tweet from Twitter on Arctic Monkeys: 30 seconds ago

Most recent tweet from Tinker on the Getty Center: 26 minutes ago
Most recent tweet from Twitter on the Getty Center: 20 seconds ago

Moreover, in order to use this thing I have to sign up for it; I can't see any way of doing a search without this step, and they also want my Twitter details, which don't get verified with Twitter.

I hope that you appreciate that I've just wasted 5 minutes of my life looking at this thing so that you don't have to!

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OneRiot for real time social search

OneRiot crawls the links people share on Twitter, Digg and other social sharing services, then indexes the content on those pages in seconds. It's ok, but fairly basic and doesn't match up to something like SocialMention.

Check Username Availability at Multiple Social Networking Sites

If you want to see if your name is available at any of 120+ social networking sites then simply pop along to Namechk.com and type it in. Works very quickly and effectively. Alternatively, try Knowem? which does the same job. Or Friendscall.me which checks 150 sites.

Scoopler: Social media engine

Scoopler: Real-time search. There are a few social search engines around, and this is the latest to join the ever growing crop. It pulls live updates from Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Delicious 'and more' (though they don't say what that means.) Very straightforward to use - just whack in some terms and you start to get results very quickly. Anything that's updating a lot results in a Twitterfall kind of effect, with very smoothing scrolling that's easy on the eye.

It's happy to work with phrase searching and the minus sign to exclude, though it doesn't appear to use stop words. The 'did you mean' option also appears to be flakey at the moment, linking every search to obama for no good reason that I could tell. Just a glitch they'll get right in no time I'm sure.

There's a 'hot topics' option, and a 'your searches' list, together with 'Popular' linking to all content, videos, links and images, which was a nice touch. Content goes back about 13 days - at least in the search that I was prepared to wade through in order to get to the end.

Scoopler is a nice social media search engine. Simple, straightforward and does the job well. I'd like an advanced search option, help screens (obviously) and RSS together with a full list of sources. However, it's still early days yet, so I'm sure they can pop those ideas onto their own wishlist!

Scoopler: Real-time search

Scoopler is a real-time search engine. It aggregates and organizes content being shared on the internet as it happens, like eye-witness reports of breaking news, photos and videos from big events, and links to the hottest memes of the day. It indexs live updates from services including Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Delicious and more.

It's very simple, straight forward and easy to use. My preference is still for SocialMention however.

Wales waves Wikia Search goodbye

Jimmy Wales in his blog has provided an Update on Wikia and that update is that basically he's waving goodbye to it. Despite a 172% growth in destination visits over 2 years it's clearly not pulling its weight. While 'in a different economy, we would continue to fund Wikia Search' it would appear this is neither the time nor the place. Resources will be directed towards Wikianswers instead. Microsoft is also pulling out of the reference business and closing Encarta.

It's sad to see both of these resources go, though Encarta rather more than Wikia search. When I first reviewed it back in Jan 08 I said "My overall impression is one of being totally underwhelmed. There are a great many blanks, unfinished sections, links that don't go anywhere and lots of not much else. It's like looking inside a large house - I can see the rooms, stairs, basement and so on, and the lights work, the water is on, but not much else."

I went back a few times to visit it and my impression never really changed for the better. I don't think that it was ever able to entirely create its own identity, and in a space crammed with Google's SearchWiki, Knol, Wikipedia itself, Mahalo etc it was only a matter of time before the curtains were drawn on it.

Addictomatic: Inhale the Web

Get a collection of resources on a subject that interests you in seconds by using Addictomatic: Inhale the Web.  This resource instantly creates a buzz page on any topic you like by dragging in content from Google, Yahoo, Technorati, Ask, YouTube, Truveo, Flickr, Blinkx, Ice Rocket, Digg, Topix, Newsvine and Tweetscan.

You can personalise the page by dropping resources, moving them around until you're happy and then bookmark the page, and come back to it whenever you have a mind to. Resources used are appropriate for the subject matter of the page, but you don't have any control over which are added, just which ones you can remove.

Lovely and straightforward. Thanks to Zena Weist for the headsup on this one.

Twemes for searching social media sites

Twemes.com. Twitter hashtag search (they use the term 'twemes'). This searches Twitter and seems to go back further than most other Twitter search engines, flickr photographs and delicious links. Moreover, you can go to a page such as http://twemes.com/name_of_hashtag and see what people have already said about a subject or conference. You can also create an RSS feed and a widget to automatically follow updates for a particular hashtag. Useful for a conference website!

Mr Taggy; social media engine

I took a look at Mr Taggy, which is a prototype engine that uses social data in the form of tags to return results. Unfortunately we're not told which resources are being used, which would be helpful. Results are clear, although there's no summary, just a list of tags and the thumbnail. The emphasis of the engine is on the tags of course, so that's not surprising.

There is a list of tags that have been chosen for search on the left, with other related tags below. What I liked about the search engine was that it was really easy to change results with a single mouse click to include or exclude tags, and the results re-arranged themselves very smoothly. They're very upfront about the prototype element, so can be forgiven for no help screens, no RSS save options and so on. For a barebones resource this works well, and it is worth including in a collection of social media engines.

Twingly Microblog Search

The blog search engine Twingly has introduced a new Microblog Search service. It searches Twitter, Jaiku, Identica and Bleeper, Bloggy and Pownce. (Yes, they know, I know and you probably do as well that Pownce has now closed, but they had it indexed so they're including it for now. I expect the same holds for Jaiku as well.)

Power search options allow searchers to look for posts written by someone, sent to someone, newer or older than a specific date, hashtag posts and posts referencing a specific user. Given the choice of resources searched the majority of results will come from Twitter - certainly the first results that came up for all the searches I ran seemed to be just Twitter. Results are also right up to date, by which I mean in the last minute or so.

The search engine is ok, but I still think that the Twitter search engine is stronger; it certainly has the location option which I like. Given that the other resources Twingly uses are pretty much also rans, I can't really see the value in using this in preference.