Realtime search has come a long way from just a year ago when the only option really was Twitter’s own search engine. Now Google, Bing, and a gaggle of realtime search startups all have products up and running (even Facebook is expanding its own realtime search to include everybody’s public stream). Today, one of those realtime search startups, CrowdEye, released a bunch of new features that point the way to a better realtime search experience. In particular, it lets you filter your search by location and sentiment (expect Google and Bing to copy some of these soon).
CrowdEye is part of an early group of startups who recently got access to Twitter’s full firehose of Tweets. Today, it turned on that firehose and is indexing a full 14 days of everything on Twitter. CrowdEye returns both links and Tweets as results, and lets you sort by relevance or time. It uses its own CrowdRank algorithm to come up with the most relevant Tweets.
But the best new features are the ones that let you sort by location and sentiment. The location filter shows only Tweets that come from a particular city or spot on a map (you can literally just place a marker on a drop-down Google Map to choose the location). The sentiment filter is more rudimentary. It only allows you to boost positive or negative results, but it doesn’t show you the overall sentiment for a keyword.
CEO Ken Moss says he hasn’t built that yet, but it shouldn’t be too hard and could show how sentiment changes over time. Brands would love that, as well as the ability to get an overall sentiment score by location. With CrowdEye’s new features, you can already filter by location and sentiment and read through the stream of results. For instance, here are negative Tweets about Pizza Hut in Chicago (“Why does pizza hut smell like this? How can people really ignore this odor? Why? Why? Why?”), and here are positive Tweets (“Just used the Pizza Hut app for the first time. Overall, great UX and pretty good pizza to back it up. Will definitely use it again.”). Oh yeah, brands are going to be all over realtime location search.
My one compliant: There are no links back to each individual Tweet, only back to the Twitter account it came from.
CrowdEye has always been proud to be on the forefront of building real-time search technology and we want to thank all of you, our amazing users, for your support. While we have been successful pushing the state of the art forward with features like location-based search, relevance sorting of results and sentiment, we have not yet built a profitable business around CrowdEye. We are hard at work innovating new real-time search ideas that have the potential for a good business model...
Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.
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