Waze is a somewhat unlikely success story. The social navigation and traffic app has just passed 7 million users globally and also announced another $30 million in funding, bringing its total to nearly $60 million. It also said that one of its new investors is Hong Kong magnate Li Ka Shing, who will help the company as it navigates (pardon the pun) the challenging and difficult Chinese market. The other investor in this round is Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Mary Meeker joins the Waze board as a result. Waze has successfully created a community of engaged drivers with its crowdso [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Search Engines: Buzz Search Engines | Search Engines: Location / Checkin Services | Search Engines: Maps & Local Search Engines | Search Engines: Mobile Search Engines | Search Engines: Real Time Search

SearchReviews has just launched a search engine with more than 40 million reviews in its system, and plans to hit 100 million reviews by the end of 2011. Those 40 million reviews cover about four million products and come from more than a thousand sites such as TripAdvisor, Amazon, Zappos and others. Those are impressive numbers, but is SearchReviews any good? More on that below along with a look at how it works. How SearchReviews Works SearchReviews appears to have the largest searchable database of strictly review content anywhere. Buzzillions advertises having 13 million reviews; Baza [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Features: Analysis | Search Engines: Buzz Search Engines | Search Engines: Maps & Local Search Engines | Search Engines: Word Of Mouth & Buzz Search Engines | Top News

Not a month goes by without someone launching a new real-time search engine; but after trying out most of them, there are few I use on a regular basis. Factery Labs is about to change that with today's launch of its real-time fact engine at 1:00 pm ET. Where other real-time search engines focus on hot tweets, popular links, and the like, Factery Labs skips all that and surfaces the facts behind the day's trending news. (image provided by Factery Labs) On the screenshot above (you can click for a larger version on Flickr), Factery Labs is showing hot topics like "california storms" an [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Search Engines: Buzz Search Engines | Search Engines: News Search Engines | Search Engines: Real Time Search | Top News

Consumers care about online reviews; small businesses (SMBs) care about what's being said about them online. Most small businesses that are aware of the phenomenon of online reviews (and care) try to monitor those reviews by using a search engine or alerts with their business name. They also visit specific sites like Yelp or Citysearch to see what's being said about them. It's an awkward process that is time consuming, but increasingly necessary. Large corporations have had various "buzz tracking" tools at their disposal to monitor "brand chatter" but these have not been available for SMBs. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Search Engines: Buzz Search Engines | Search Engines: Maps & Local Search Engines | Search Engines: Other Search Engines | Search Engines: Word Of Mouth & Buzz Search Engines

We recently saw Twitter change the look of its public homepage to make it look more like a search engine. And last week we found out that Twitter's new search guru is Doug Cook, who was formerly of Yahoo and inktomi. Cook also built a wine search engine called Able Grape as a kind of labor of love. Twitter is now effectively competing in search with not only the major players but all the third parties that are using the site's API as the backbone of their own engines. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Search Engines: Buzz Search Engines | Search Engines: Real Time Search | Twitter

Add FriendFeed to the long and growing list of players who are trying to win the race for comprehensive and quick real-time search. FriendFeed has always had a real-time element -- the ability to track social activities almost as they happen. But the company has announced the addition of real-time search today. If you've used search.twitter.com, you'll be familiar with FriendFeed's real-time search -- the interface is almost exactly the same. One difference that FriendFeed is quick to point out is that its results update automatically and scroll down the page, without the need to click [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Search Engines: Buzz Search Engines | Search Engines: Word Of Mouth & Buzz Search Engines

There's a much longer post to be written on Google and so-called "real-time" search. Twitter is both more and less than a search engine, but there are lots of third parties doing search-like things around the Twitter data. However, yesterday at an event in London, Loic Le Meur elicited this response from Google co-founder Larry Page after a question about Twitter: "I have always thought we needed to index the web every second to allow real time search. At first, my team laughed and did not believe me. Now they know they have to do it. Not everybody needs sub-second indexing but people are get [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Google: General | Google: Outside US | Search Engines: Buzz Search Engines | Twitter

Whenever the subject of real-time search and/or Twitter search comes up, someone inevitably argues that there's too much noise to make it worthwhile; there are too many random conversations and meaningless chatter to find anything of value. It's a generally fair argument. But one company thinks it's found a way to cut through some of that noise. OneRiot, a real-time search engine for web and video content, has launched a new Twitter search engine with a unique angle: Rather than focus on what people are saying, the search engine focuses on the web pages people are linking to. "Our approa [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Search Engines: Buzz Search Engines | Search Engines: Social Search Engines | Search Engines: Word Of Mouth & Buzz Search Engines | Twitter

Tom Churm pinged me about a new tool that he's crafted, Very Recent, designed to pull back top results from "recency search engines," for lack of a better word. Blog search, news search, social news plus Twittering, all in one. It needs a lot of work, but I found it a pretty neat idea. And it reminded me of Addictomatic, which is also well worth a look. Do a search at Very Recent, say, for iphone (the best phone evah!), and you get back results on a single page from: Twitter (Summize) Google Blog Search Technorati Flickr Yahoo News YouTube Digg This is pretty cool. Many times I'v [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Search Engines: Buzz Search Engines