Artiklz Opens the Conversation Search Engine To See What People Talk about Where
January 07, 2009 |
Over the last few weeks I’ve been participating in private beta testing of conversation search engine with Artiklz, a company specializing in aggregating conversations around blog posts and bringing them back to the blog owner (we have spoken about Artiklz here, here and here before when the startup announced their news). Today the company has opened up the conversation search tool to the public so everyone is welcome to take a look at something new and promising in the field of social media conversations if you feel like discovering some more of them.
Basically what Artiklz offers is a search engine that indexes user-generated content across various social media sites and allows anyone interested to find conversations on any given subject and mentions of any word in any conversation – no matter where it happens. Right now the search engine aggregates conversations from popular blog platforms as well as sharing and discussion sites like Digg, Reddit, Mixx, Yahoo! Buzz, FriendFeed, Delicious, and others.
So from now on everyone can easily join Artiklz – by either registering for an account or by simply using one of the OpenID providers to join – and begin searching for the topics they are interested in discussed on social media sites. Registration is actually required to be able to perform searches but I do hope it will not be a requirement in the future as a search engine that requires users to log in every time they want to find something will have to spend a lot of time explaining users why they need to do so.
What is of particular interest to me is that Artiklz allows to perform searches only in selected sources – social news, blogs, microblogging services, review sites or forums only – or in all the sources available at once. So you can get a full picture on any subject you are interested in and see what people say about it on blogs, on Digg or on Twitter – all in one place.
What’s more, there are multiple options to customize the search output so that you could sort out the results by the number of comments or by the number of people commenting on them – so that you could first check the hottest conversations and then move to some less animated discussions in your research on a topic.
Of course Artiklz is not the first service working in the field: for example, you can already search the conversations in the blogosphere using the pretty new BackType blog comments aggregator but the main difference is that Artiklz brings everything into one place – be it blog posts, comments, or discussions on Digg. All in all, it’s a great tool for marketing people trying to keep good track of the brands they promote so I do feel there’s potential here and if they add further tracking capabilities for everything you can find everywhere, it is certainly off for a very good start here.
