Social Searcher
Category: Tech Visualization
Link: https://www.social-searcher.com/
Demo Leader: Ri
Summary:
Social Search is a behavior of retrieving and searching on a social searching engine that mainly searches user-generated content such as news, videos and images related search queries on social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Flickr [1]. It was originally created as www.facebook-search.com on June 2010 and later migrated to www.social-searcher.com on May 2011. The site itself is not affiliated with social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, or Google. The site allows users to search publicly posted information on Twitter, Google+, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, Reddit, Flickr, Dailymotion, and Vimeo. All these public information can be browsed via the site without the need of logging in or creating an account. However, a registered free user gets some benefits. Such as, saving their searches, setting up email alerts, etc. A premium-registered user can avail him/herself of premium features, such as saving social mentions history, exporting data, API integration, advanced analytics, immediate email notifications, etc. [2]
Reflection:
I think such real-time search engine for social media can be used to a great extent by the journalists. It can also reflect the public sentiment over a particular topic. As mentioned in the article [3] by Journalism UK, the Android app for social searcher became the “App of the week for journalists”.
I really liked the visualization of the data presented on the website. The interactive interface along with rich information was a delight to use.
I, however, was confused about the way they filtered the sentiment of the posts. In many cases, I found dissimilarities between the post and its assigned sentiment.
One another thing that intrigued me is that the site has this tool called “HOT Trends”, where articles about latest trends are supposedly listed. However, at the time of my personal exploration (December 2017), I found all of the hot trended articles to be dated back to 2015. I could not fathom how such outdated articles could be listed as “HOT Trends”. It also leads me to the belief that these articles might have been manually trended as such and are currently not properly monitored and updated.
Their special projects also seemed to be quite outdated having the latest project article dated March 2014.
How to:
- Go to the URL: https://www.social-searcher.com/
- Type in the search box. This invokes one of the site’s tools called “Social Buzz”. This tool can also be accessed from the footer of the website.
- The searches can be made based on Keywords, Exact Keywords, and Minus Keywords via the Keywords Tab.
- You can specify the sources from which they want the information from via Sources Tab. In addition, you can mention specific Facebook URL as the source.
- You can further select the types of the posts, such as link, status, photo, and/or video in the More tab.
- In the Filter Search, you can also provide the above parameters, like the types of the posts and selection of sources. In addition to these, you can filter the searches based on sentiment (Positive, Negative, and/or Neutral). Positive sentiment is colored by Green, whereas, Negative and Neutral are colored as Red and Grey respectively.
- Each of the posts allows you to go to the original post or share the post via the three-dotted-option at the right bottom corner of each post.
- In order to see the detailed statistics with data visualization, you can click on the button “Detailed Statistics”. This will populate the data based on the criteria, general, sentiment, users, links, types, and keywords.
- You can also export the data from the more option.
- You can finally check out the other features in the footer of the website, such as, blog, pricing, about, plugins, API, etc. to get a better idea about their system.
References:
[1] Social Search, definition by WIKIPEDIA
[2] Social Searcher, the official page.
[3] “App of the week for journalists” – by Journalism UK
