Phil Bradley's weblog

surchur pushing real time search

The Dashboard to Right Now. That's the tagline that surchur uses, and they're keen to expand - they have a sort of challenge at the moment, asking people to find a better place for real time discovery. I say 'sort of challenge' because it isn't really - they're just asking people to use their product. Nothing wrong with that - I'm just a little picky over semantics is all. I've written about surchur before but to be honest, I'm having difficulty in seeing exactly what has changed since August last year and now.

surchur does have a 'real time board' that pops up hot topics and catching fire resources. However, I'm not entirely impressed with their options. 'Laptop', 'china' and 'miley cyrus' I can understand, and can always do a mouseover to see context. However, that context isn't related to one single thing - content for 'laptop' for example refers to an Engadget blog, an article on how to find a cheap laptop and so on. Simply because lots of people are talking generally about a subject doesn't really make it a hot topic in my book. Another example or two: 'white' and 'fox'. Meaningless. Even mouseover the word doesn't help that much. Catching fire topics are little better. There is little, or any distinction between newsworthy content (of which I found next to nothing) and silly hashtags such as 'dontyouhatewhen'. This is not news, it's not information, it's a waste of my time surchur! (The mouseover element is also interesting, since it's actually static. You see information, but you can't actually click on it at all - a criticism I had back in August. Move the mouse too enthusiastically and poof! you've lost the box.)

surchur can of course argue that they're simply reflecting current trends. However, what I expect from a solid, reliable resource is the ability to differentiate between the real news and a friviolous hashtag.

Individual searches I'm happier with. Type in your search, get related surches (sic), see popular content, or content from blogs, social web, news, video, pictures, products or quotes. I really like the quotes option a lot, although sometimes I did just get a whole series of tweets which didn't actually help me that much. I can also vote up or vote down results, and can comment on them. Now, while I *can* do that, I'm not entirely sure why I'd *want* to do that. I'm a librarian/searcher, and I want information to use, not spend time playing around with it. Sorry if that sounds a little harsh, but that's the way that it is. I'm sure it's a great function for other people (although I'd question how social this is), but it's of limited value as a searcher, in my opinion.

It's worth comparing the results on surchur with those on Socialmention which provide me with a useful grid of strength, sentiment, passion and reach, average mentions, last mention, unique authors, positive/negative/neutral comments, top keywords, top users, top hashtags, AND the ability to sort by date, source and postrank AND limit to specific time periods.

Let's try Collecta as well. Their 'hot right now' includes Google broadband, iPad, Final Four, Healthcare Reform, Moscow Subway Bombing. The links change while I watch. surchur hasn't moved. When searching using Collecta users can limit to stories, comments, updates, photographs or video, or any combination thereof. Results are 2 column, with comments/tweets etc in the middle (search options are on the left) with the actual content appearing in the right hand pane. And I can click on the link and visit the original source, quickly and easily (which to be fair I can do with surchur). Interestingly, Collecta continues to monitor real time content while I'm looking at results, pulling in things for me to look at on a regular basis. That's real time search!

Let's move onto IceRocket. This doesn't have a 'what's hot' option, so surchur wins out on that count. However, when I run a search on the Big Buzz option, Icerocket pulls in data from blogs, Twitter, video and images on a single blended page. I did a search on both IceRocket and surchur for a tweet that I'd run 45 minutes earlier. Icerocket found it, surchur didn't. (It was for a fairly odd term as well, so no chance that it would lost in a flood.) Furthermore, Big Buzz auto refreshes, every 1,3,5 minutes (or not at all) to the users preference.

So surchur - what would I like you to do? Quite a lot actually. Sharpen up the trending topics, preferably to compete with Icerockets 1 minute option. Provide RSS feeds for my searches - I want data to come to me, I don't want to come to your site to fetch it. I want a help screen to see what searches I can do. You need to learn about Boolean operators - a search for cat NOT dog means that I don't want results with dog in them!

OK, so I took the challenge. How'd I do?

Edited to add an emailed response from surchur:

"Thank you for the review, we appreciate every single feedback and it's nice to see what people actually like and where improvement is necessary.
By the way, you mentioned the RSS feeds, every search has RSS feed and also check the Extras feature, there are some other RSS options well.
All in all, to answer your question, you did great on the challenge."

Thank you and hope to keep getting your constructive feedback in the future as well - especially as we still have 2 more challenges to launch."

I'm very happy to put the record straight on the RSS option, and appreciate the way that surchur took my criticisms. I'm looking forward to their next challenges!

Twitter Enjoys Major Growth and Excellent Stickiness

Well, despite people saying that Twitter was going to be obsolete or fail it would seem that actually Twitter Enjoys Major Growth and Excellent Stickiness with a 30% growth in tweets in the last 4 months to 53 million in March, up from 40 million in December. People who have been on Twitter for more than 9 months have increased their activity to 46.2% of total tweets - the more time that people spend on Twitter, the more often they tweet.

This really isn't that much of a surprise. I've been a firm advocate of Twitter from the first day that I started to use it. The strength of the service is simply that it's like a pencil. You can use it for lots of different things. You don't need to join it in order to search - it's a lovely flow of real time news and data, just waiting to be tapped into. It can be used as a broadcast medium - have a twitter feed onto your home page and update via Tweets - choose a good hashtag and use it to broadcast what's happening at your conference. Use it as a social medium to keep in contact with colleagues. Ask questions, answer questions, post polls, link to images and video - what's not to love about it?

Flickr: The National Archives UK's Photostream

If you're looking for some interesting historical documents, 19th/20th century photographs, artwork or illuminations, you would do worse than visit the Flickr: The National Archives UK's Photostream. It currently has just a shade over 200 images, but there are no known copyright restrictions on them, so you can use them however you'd like to.

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Is Google Buzz Dead Already?

A timely article from Search Engine Land which looks at how interest in Google Buzz has quickly fallen off. This comes as no surprise at all; I was used to getting a lot of Buzz notifications and chat coming through - in the hundreds, but this has all but petered out; I've not looked at mine in days and there's still only 35 unread pieces there - most of which are going to be tweets that I've already seen.

Not surprised are you? No, thought not. Orkut (Google's attempt at a social network) has never set the world alight, Wave was less than a ripple, and Buzz has the impact of a rather elderly bee with one wing. Try as it might, Google simply doesn't understand social media. They rushed out Buzz without consideration, backtracked over the privacy issues and generally 'didn't get it'. It reminds me of the situation 20 years ago when Microsoft didn't get the Internet. They've been struggling to keep up and are finally getting into the game. I wonder at the extent to which social media is going to be Google's really weak spot. Meanwhile it's back to Twitter and Facebook for me, and everyone else I reckon.

Bing adds quick reference/location option

A nice piece of functionality from Bing has recently been introduced. It's a quick reference/location option, and turns up on most searches now - just check the left hand menu for 'Reference articles on'. Clicking on this pulls up content from Wikipedia, with data from the original article, and an overview box on the right for outline, images, locations. It's a very nice idea, discussed in more detail on their blog. I particularly like the location option, which displays a map and you can zoom in and around as necessary, all without leaving the page. I'd have preferred a greater variety of content, pulled from more sources than just Wikipedia, but the concept is great. This is what it looks like:

ArchivePDF - Free eBooks Download

Does pretty much what it says on the tin. Type in a book, author etc to  ArchivePDF and get a listing back of documents you can download. The results screen is however very poor, with no information other than the URL to work with, which didn't warm me to it.

Nginer: framing multi search engine

Nice enough search engine; Nginer frames results from different engines into a window for you to quickly scroll through. This usually works well, but I did see images falling off the right hand side once or twice and since there wasn't a scroll bar I was unable to see everything that I was supposed to. In the basic web search it provides access to 10 different search engines - it's nice to see AltaVista sitting among them as well.

The engine also provides access to different types of search - as well as Web, there are options for Blogs, Images, Bookmarking, Books, Downloads, Jobs, Lyrics, Music and Videos, all with different options available. Not every option worked, but I'm happy to put it down to a bit of a glitch in the system.

Really easy to use this one. A lovely straightforward way to try a different search engine.

A flower search engine

GazoPa Bloom is a flower community site that enables users to search, discover and share flower information. GazoPa’s similar image search technology enables users to search for flower names by uploading flower photos that are unfamiliar to them. Users can also share flower knowledge as well as flower photos. GazoPa Bloom is a service for people who love flowers.

Sounds like a lot of fun if you're into flowers. I'm not, so haven't signed up for the private beta, so can't comment further, but if you are, and you do, please let a comment to tell the rest of us what you think of it!

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Twitter to change search results - bad idea!

The story from Mashable is that Twitter will 'Show Popular Tweets On Top of search results' and they are quite excited about it: "We think the new feature is an important evolution of the Twitter search experience and one we’re looking forward to seeing in action." I think it's a stupid and unhelpful idea. If Twitter is anything, then it's real time data and search. The emphasis is on getting information out quickly, being able to share it and quite frankly I enjoy the egalitarian nature of it. My tweets are no more important than yours and vice versa. Twitter disagrees though, hence the popularity aspect.

There aren't that many ways of working out 'popularity'. By number of followers is an obvious. Given that some actor chappie that I've never heard of has 4.5 million followers I guess he's going to be pretty popular. If he decides to comment on the latest news story, do I want to read what he says? Probably not, and I certainly don't want Twitter to pop his stuff to the top simply because he's got a large following.

Another approach is via RT - retweeting. This is a better idea, but again is based on followers. If the actor says something and it gets RT a lot, again I don't think that actually means a great deal. There's already a huge amount of egotism in Twitter based on followers, and I think it's detrimental to the service. This leads to an interesting question - if I tweet something, and then someone famous retweets it, and then her followers retweet again and again, does that make her more 'popular' than the actual originator of the information?

A third approach is a twist on the follower thing - the more someone is followed, and the less they follow back. Can't see this working well either, since everyone will be going through their account deleting people they follow like crazy, until they work out that the people they dropped then drop them back.

If Twitter want to make this work, they need to add in another step I think. Which is to say that I should be able to arrange results based on the people who I follow. If I'm searching for information I'm going to be much more interested in the people who I follow, and I'd find it interesting to see what 'popular' people are saying. This still doesn't help if I'm looking for information in totally different areas though, so it's going to be of limited value.

Twitter - your strength isn't search, really. It's amassing huge amounts of data very quickly and throwing it back out to people who are interested. The users decide who is popular, based on their own opinions, and that's as it should be. Don't start telling me what I should be thinking, or who I should be listening to - I can do that myself thanks very much. If you're going to spend programming time doing anything, spend it on setting up good strong filtering systems so I can tune into or out of the conversations of the people that I follow, and while you're at it, introduce a good conversation threader. Leave search up to the people who want to search and who are good at it.

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• Twitter Search Results to Show Popular Tweets On Top (mashable.com)

SimilarSiteSearch finds similar sites

I really like search engines that find sites based on information that you already have, so I'm very pleased to see SimilarSiteSearch which does exactly that. Simply type in a URL of a site that you want to find 'more of' as it were, and it'll pull up suggestions for you. I tried my site and it gave me other sites that were about Web 2.0, librarianship, internet search and so on. Very nice indeed.