Track Mentions in Blogs

Okay, a tool that searches a bunch of other search engines is called a metasearch engine. What's a tool that searches mentions of a specific URL from a variety of sources? Metamention? Anyway that's what Talk Digger ( http://talkdigger.com/ ) does. I couldn't get this to work in Opera; you'll need Firefox. You'll also need cookies enabled if you want to use it over a long period of time.

The front page of the site has a query box and several different engines listed. Enter a URL and click Dig It. All the engines will start what looks like an animated gif and one by one will list results for each of the sites. Most of the engines listed (with the exception of PubSub) have icons underneath the result count to open the result list in a new window, in the same window, or within the Talk Digger itself. (PubSub lacks the icon to open the result within Talk Digger itself.) If you choose to open the results within Talk Digger, A window will open underneath the name of the service with the first three results.

If you've used the service multiple times AND you have cookies turned on, you'll also see a graph for each service showing whether the number of results is trending up or trending down.

I kinda like this, but I wish they had either limited it to 'blog/RSS search engines or made the general search engines optional. Feedster and Technorati are great, but after them the Google general Web results just look weird. There was a little bit of extra funkiness, too -- like Technorati didn't have any results for the URL I specified. In my experience Technorati sometimes times out when you look at it, though, so that might be on their end, not Talk Digger.

Beyond that this is cool and is becoming more and more useful. Any way to get these kinds of results into an RSS feed?

Posted to Internet-Weblogs-Search | TrackBack