This is a guide to social media search engines, which are enhanced versions of search engines combining the traditional, algorithm-driven technology with online community filtering.
Social media search engines search largely on user-generated content like news, photos or other images, news, online forums, and social media platforms like Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Successful social media search engine algorithms consider not only the relevance between a search query and the keywords on a social media page, but also the social relationships between the searcher and the results. In other words, where the information is available, social media interactions from people who work for the same company, belong to the same social group, or attend the same school as the searcher will be taken into account when the algorithm considers the relevance of search results.
Other things that might be taken into account include shared bookmarks, the tagging of content with descriptive labels. Social media searches will consider content that was created or touched by other users in the same social graph as the person making the query, which depicts the personal relationships of Internet users.
Depending on the policies of a specific search engine, these results will be saved and added to the community search results, improving the relevance of results in subsequent queries. The idea is that the consideration of social interactions and relationships would result in more relevant responses for the user than computer algorithms alone.
The focus of this category is on social media search engines.
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As its name suggests, Boardreader has a focus on spidering and rendering results from the content of online forums, bulletin board systems, blogs, and other sources, its function being to index the contents of these sites rather than returning a list of forums or blogs. Its advanced search functions allow users to filter results using a number of variables, such as posts or threads, dates, language, and domain, and to sort results by relevance or freshness. Statistics are included.
http://www.boardreader.com/
GSS allows users to locate content created by friends, family members, or others in the same social circle. In order to conduct a Google Social Search, users should be logged into their Google account. Listings from a user’s social circle will appear at the bottom of the search results page when Google considers them to be relevant. Instructions on improving search results are posted to the site, along with comparisons of the features of its free and premium services.
https://www.social-searcher.com/google-social-search/
Pipl is an information services company specializing in finding people. The proprietary search tool searches publicly available online and offline information from millions of sources, allowing businesses to conduct searches on a variety of parameters, including names, email addresses, phone numbers, and social usernames. Pipl is designed to retrieve information from the deep web as well as the visible web, using language analysis and ranking algorithms to return relevant results.
https://pipl.com/
Snapbird adds to the search facilities of Twitter, allowing Twitter users to search their friends’ tweets, direct messages, and favorites, and to do so at periods further back in history than Twitter’s internal search allows. However, in order for it to be effective, users must give full service access to their Twitter accounts, including full read and write permissions, although it promises never to post to a user’s account and to read only that which is requested in a search.
https://snapbird.org/
Using Snitch.Name, a searcher can enter a name, their own or someone else’s, then sit back and watch as the site calls up information from dozens of search engines, social media networks, academic publications, professional networks, directories, and regional and governmental sources. Users can choose which sources they want to search or they may opt to search them all. Donations are solicited, and plugins and buttons are included.
http://snitch.name/
Social Searcher is a free social media search engine that allows users to search for content in social networks in real-time, providing deep analytics data. Publicly posted information from Twitter and Facebook are available without a login, while premium social media features include the discovery of web mentions, unlimited historical data, exporting data, API integration, advanced analytics, and immediate email notifications. Users can search by mentions, names, or trends.
https://www.social-searcher.com/
Online since 1998, WorldCat is a union catalog that itemizes the collections of libraries in more than a hundred and seventy countries and territories that participate in the Online Computer Library Center, a global cooperative whose member libraries maintain the database. Users may search books, DVDs, CDs, articles, or the entire database by keyword or by library. Registration is optional, but some features require registration. Other web services are also available.
https://www.worldcat.org/
