Sunday 29 November 2009

Looking for something? A whole new way to search...

I recently found a new search engine. This engine doesn't try to crawl the whole web, instead choosing to focus on social media sites. This tight focus allows it to return almost real-time information from sites such as Twitter.

This can be enormously useful at times, and I've just had occasion to be very grateful for this new engine. I wanted to get some new information about marketing with Facebook. Google, Bing and Yahoo all returned articles from their favoured sites. The same sites they always return with disheartening regularity.

This new search engine (Bliipa) returned an article published yesterday. I doubt I would have found this article had I used Twitter's own built-in search tool, as it gives prominence to the most recent tweets first. And in this category, there are too many tweets for it to show up a day later.

There's nothing wrong with the way the major search engines, or Twitters own search tools work. But they do sometimes make it harder to find what you're looking for.

Bliipa's focus on social media sites offers a greater degree of discrimination than other engines in this case. And pointed me at a wonderful article. Take Bliipa for a spin, and see what you can find.

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