Social Search Engines

Pipes: Social Media Firehose

Social Media Firehose (SMF) is a beta Yahoo site that lets you query multiple social media sites. Some of the sites queries include Flickr, Twitter, Friendfeed and Digg. Enter a company name - Mars Candy, for instance - and then exclude the company's Web site address to avoid retrieving hits from it. SMF returns a list of results that you may review by thumbnail images or by text headlines.

Scribd

Scribd is an online library of documents on a vast array of topics. You may browse or search documents, groups or people (members) by keyword. Documents appear in many different formats, including Word, PDF, PowerPoint, and more.

Scribd Groups gives 2 or more members with similar interests a way to share and discuss documents or other information. You may make a group private or public.

I was able to search, browse and display documents without registering. However, uploading, downloading, and of course, joining a group requires registration.

Summize Conversational Search

Search Twitter tweets in real time. In my brief tests, the search engine does appear to query tweets (postings) in real time. Search by keyword; or select the advanced search option to query certain fields, such as who authored the tweet (from:), or posts referencing an author (@). You may also search for imbedded URLs to discover who is tweeting your Web pages. You might want to convert the Web page URL to a tinyurl address first because many tweets shorten the URL to save space.

Wink

Wink queries social networking sites, such as MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, LinkedIn and Live Spaces, to find public profiles of participants. Additionally, Wink lets you create your own Wink profile so that you may "control your name, location, description, and other contact information." Initial results show the screen name and other basic public information, such as the individual's industry and social networking affiliation (site).

Wink recently expanded the sites it queries to include some people search sources, such as The Internet Movie Database and Wikipedia.