There are plenty of ways to monitor the buzz of any given topic in the blogosphere, on Twitter, or across social networks. There is Artiklz, Trendpedia, Trackur, Brandseye, Radian6, Attentio, Buzzcapture and Chatterguard, to name a few.. Now Omgili, a search engine that focuses on forums, discussion boards, newsgroups, and Q&A sites, has just added a new buzztracker called Omgili Stream. It searches the same set of discussion sites on the Web and returns results based on how recently they appeared.
Results are not ranked by anything other than chronology, which produces an undifferentiated set of results. What I really want to know is what are the most important or influential discussions going on about any given topic. Fortunately, Omgili Stream allows you to filter results by minimum number of replies, language, and where the search term appears (in the title, topic, or replies). Another filter opens up a column with Twitter search results on the left. A unified view might be preferable, but that might then be dominated by the Twitter results. Omgili’s strength is in searching through discussion boards, forms, and the like. It sifts through 7 million such posts a day.
Omgili’s greatest strength (its focus on deep discussion sites), is also its greatest weakness. It completely ignores blog comments, for instance, where a huge chunk of discussion on the Web takes place. That is a huge oversight, in my opinion. Although, there are other sites where you can search across only blog comments, such as Backtype or Artiklz. And then what about public discussions on Facebook and other social networks?
Omgili is geared towards marketers who want to keep track of what people are saying about their products, companies and brands. Yet it returns results from only one portion of the Web. So if you are a marketer, you might want to bookmark it (consumers might be more likely to talk about product defects or other problems on a discussion board or Q&A site where they are looking for assistance from other users). But it only addresses a portion of the discuss-o-sphere.
As far as it goes, it does a decent job. One of the more helpful features of Omgili is the ability to create a buzz chart for any set of topics. Below is one comparing “IE8” to “Gmail” and “Flip Video.”
