A lot of search engines are heating up their stoves with some live Web juice. A few days back, Steve Rubel enthusiastically welcomed the new IceRocket Web Search, which scans Twitter, blogs, news stories, videos and images on the spot to retrieve a rich SERP to your query.
Today, another player in the search space, Twingly, released a new search feature too, this one more condensed and limited to microblogging platforms: the Microblog search. Unlike IceRocket multimedia search, Twingly solely fetches results from Twitter, Jaiku, Identitca, Bleeper, Bloggy and Pownce.
The experience is fairly nice, and everything you need is there: customize your search by checking sources in or out, subscribe to a query, subscribe via email, or embed the live SERP in a widget (very light snippet of code).
So the question is: does it make sense to track all the microblogging platforms, instead of simply going for the much acclaimed Twitter search engine, which has the biggest microblogging platform anyway? For example, Jaiku is in the search source bundle, despite Google’s recent announcement to drop it. Microblogging platforms are not stable businesses yet – even Twitter is still controversially mainstream.
Here is the result for ‘gphone’:
Here is the result for Obama:
And one for IceRocket:
(as you can see, the widgets are not working very properly)
Most results come from Twitter. Surprised? I am a little bit actually, but one thing is sure: Marketers, if you want to use The new Twingly Microblog search engine, make sure you’ve signed up to Ping.fm or Hellotxt to facilitate your microblogging experience.