(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” and “supreme court ruling.” But rather than showing important tweets, tweets from important people, or the most popular links for each topic, it’s showing me the facts related to them. Under the “supreme court ruling” tab on the right, for example, a quick glance tells me that a 5-4 Supreme Court vote “loosened restrictions on corporate campaign spending and had President Barack Obama fuming.” It seems to me that this is exactly what real-time search needs: information, depth, and context.

During a demo call last week, Factery co-founders Paul Pedersen, who previously worked at Google and Infoseek, and Sean Gaddis, formerly at Netscape, eBay, and Skype, explained where the real-time facts are coming from and what happens behind the scenes. (Not on the call but worth mentioning here is that Factery’s lead engineer Nitay Joffe has spent time at both Google and Powerset.)

How It Works

Factery Labs tracks the trending topics from the Twitter and Google Trends APIs to determine what’s hot right now. It identifies relevant tweets and URLs from Twitter, and also taps into Yahoo BOSS to identify additional URLs that may be relevant to the trending topics. Once it has this collection of URLs, it scans them for facts and applies its FactRank technology (a nod to Google’s PageRank) to build what users see on the site’s “Trends” tab.

“We drill past the links and get into the pages to see if there’s something valuable to the user’s request,” Pedersen said last week. “It’s not news; it’s news according to what the web says is news. We show what’s happening as defined by the web, not by an editor.”

There are seven other tabs, covering topics like sports, politics, entertainment, and tech. The topics that show up on these are user-defined, and are not necessarily trending topics from Twitter and Google Trends.

Users can conduct searches and “favorite” their search by clicking a yellow star; this adds the query to the main panel and saves it there for when the user returns to the site. Each fact can also be shared via Facebook, Twitter, or email.

Strengths & Weaknesses

Factery’s fact engine is, to me, a compelling tool for anyone who’s interested in current news and events. The focus on facts over recent/hot tweets and popular links eliminates a lot of the noise that’s sometimes associated with trending topics and real-time search. It’s like Google News, only without all the blue links and the need to click five articles to find out what’s going on.

But there’s still room for improvement. It’s not completely free of noise/spam — I saw ticket agency offers appearing in the results for some sports-related topics. It sometimes pulls odd facts for topics on the non-trending tabs, like a legal disclaimer from NBA.com (see image at right). There are also some API issues with displaying the source of the facts; rather than seeing the real source of the fact, you’ll occasionally see Bit.ly and other shortened URLs. Factery says it’s working on a fix for that.

Conclusion

What I like about Factery’s fact engine is that it does the grunt work for me. It not only shows me what’s hot in the news right now, but it also tells me why. Popular tweets and links are part of the real-time equation, but some of that is noise; I think there’s real value in Factery’s focus on the facts.

And I can’t help but wonder, as Google and the other big search engines continue to emphasize answers, facts, and information “shortcuts” in their search results … is this a preview of what all search engines will look like someday?

Large corporations have had various “buzz tracking” tools at their disposal to monitor “brand chatter” but these have not been available for SMBs. Marchex has now created a comprehensive reputation management tool aimed at the SMB market that enables monitoring of virtually everything being said about them online via a single dashboard. I’ve seen the demo and it’s a very impressive offering. The search tie-in is that the tool is built on top of Marchex’s OpenList search and reviews aggregation technology. During the beta period SMBs can get direct access but after that it will apparently only be available through Marchex’s partners (e.g., YellowPages.com) and not directly to SMBs. I think that’s unfortunate because it’s a valuable tool and service that SMBs would directly pay for.

The press release summarizes the content and data being collected:

Marchex Reputation Management was built using proprietary local search technology from Marchex’s Open List local search network. Covering more than 8,000 sources and currently containing more than a quarter billion pieces of meta-data, Marchex Reputation Management monitors and reports on a specific business’ online footprint, including its user reviews and news, blog and social media mentions. In addition, Marchex Reputation Management ensures the accuracy of information in existing online business listings found on general search sites, local search sites and directories, such as consistent business name, address and phone numbers, as well as making recommendations as to where to add new listings for more coverage. This information is refreshed daily.

Marchex Reputation Management blends Marchex’s heritage in local search with its proven ability to partner and deliver local advertising solutions. Specific features include:

• Reviews: Charts break out the percentage of positive, neutral or negative reviews in an easy-to-read display.
• Mentions: Charts demonstrate activity by reviews or mentions to tie the information back to particular changes in the business or marketing efforts by month.
• Business listings: Ensure business listings are accurate and visible on top online consumer destinations.
• Keyword identification: Top keywords and phrases are highlighted to identify the terms that differentiate the business and act as an alert to any customer service issues.
• Competitive marketing analysis: Compare a business to other local businesses to analyze how its reputation and marketing efforts stack up.
• Ability to engage: Share positive news and reviews with customers and employees through email, Twitter, Facebook, Digg or other sources.

The tool can be used to determine where business listings exist online and how consistent and complete they are; but it’s most valuable, as the name suggests, to track reviews and what’s said about a business. SMBs can also compare themselves to others and direct competitors. And there’s the ability to share reviews via Twitter, Facebook, etc, which takes this beyond simply a monitoring tool into the realm of outbound marketing:

I spoke with Marchex EVP of Product Engineering Matthew Berk, whose OpenList was acquired by Marchex in 2006 and is the basis of this tool, and he said that SMBs in the beta test are figuring out that they can use this not only for monitoring of reviews but also to glean information for later marketing purposes. It has long been the case that proactive SMBs have used online reviews to improve their service or identify problems but there hasn’t been an easy way for them to get all the relevant information in a single tool or dashboard.

GetListed does a good job of helping businesses identify where they show up online and provides a number of services for SEO purposes. But in terms of monitoring online ratings and reviews of local businesses and building a suite of services around that, there isn’t anything else in the market (to my knowledge) that does this.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

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 or refresh. The other, bigger difference, of course, is that FriendFeed’s search pulls in data from a wide variety of sources (including Twitter).

The FriendFeed search includes options to save your searches or view them in a smaller, pop-out window. You can also post your search on other social sites, or grab some code to embed the search elsewhere.

But one thing that doesn’t seem right is the randomness of search results.

That’s a close-up of the image I used above showing four results that are in nothing close to chronological order. All the searches I tested today had the same problem.

“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 getting pretty excited about realtime.”

More interesting than perhaps whether Google takes Twitter seriously — we already know they did — is the question of how Google would do this and what it might show, given how much noise, fluff and garbage shows up on Twitter.

There’s also a great deal of value in what’s showing up on Twitter but getting at that in a coherent way is where the challenge resides. I would guess that Google will study some of the third parties trying to index tweets and the related pages they cite to determine an approach.

Here’s more discussion of Page’s remark on Techmeme.

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 approach is, you’d go to Twitter for the conversation,” says OneRiot GM Tobias Peggs, “but you’d come to OneRiot for the content.”

How It Works

One Riot indexes tweets, looking for messages with embedded links, then crawls and indexes the content being linked to. The OneRiot algorithm includes spam analysis and has checks for timeliness, relevance, and a “hotness”/freshness factor for URLs that are being talked about a lot in recent tweets. Here’s what it looked like yesterday on a search for iPhone:

As you can see, the focus is on content — on the URLs people are discussing and sharing on Twitter. Search results are displayed in the familiar Title-Snippet-URL format. But Twitter is a social site, so OneRiot’s search results also include some social elements for anyone who wants to dip into the conversation. Each result includes a reference to how recently the URL was shared on Twitter, how many tweets mention it, and who first found it on Twitter. Clicking on the “Shared in (N) tweets” link displays the tweets that mention this URL:

(you can click for the larger version of both images on Flickr)

It’s a unique approach to Twitter search that should prove particularly beneficial to the growing business community on Twitter. In my short time testing the service, I found that it does bypass a lot of the noise and chatter, and leads more quickly to relevant content. And there’s a convenience factor, too, in that OneRiot’s search expands shortened URLs, so you can see the actual content people are talking about without having to click first on a TinyURL or some other link.

An alpha version of their Twitter search engine is available now at twitter.oneriot.com. The company plans to get user feedback for at least a few weeks before eventually moving Twitter search to the main OneRiot.com search engine. You can message @OneRiot on Twitter to give feedback.

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’ve been to some event and wondered what the buzz was about it. I’ll do a Google news search, then a blog search, then a Twitter search. I really need a single tool like Google News that will cluster or group the buzz on a topic for me.

Yes, I know there are various buzz metrics tools, such as Trackur. But unlike Trackur (unless I’ve missed it), I like how you can view results by source on Very Recent, rather than being all grouped in one. Plus, it’s a free tool.

That’s not to say I wouldn’t like a unified view. I’d like that, too, with perhaps some nice clustering and a much better interface presentation. But Tom’s just knocked it out, so I’ll hope that Very Recent improves.

Other nice options would be the ability to customize sources, perhaps add in FriendFeed if you want or a variety of other sites (like some social, news, and buzz sites from this great list).

That brings me to Addictomatic, which I wrote about last May. From what I said then:

From Dave Pell of Rollyo, it lets you pull back matching results from news search, blog search, and social media sharing sites.

What’s going on with Myanmar and the cyclone recovery? A myanmar search lets you see top results from major news sites, Google Blog Search, Technorati, YouTube, Digg, Flickr, and more on a single page. Nice! Don’t want a particular source? Just click the X in its box to make it disappear.

The NewsFix area also lets you see sources selected for particular topics. Thought 2.0 is kind of fun — a variety of A-List blogs all on a single page, showing their headlines.

So Addictomatic does what I wish Very Recent could do — lets you add sources, much nice to view. Looking again at it, I wish I would make the boxes stretch across an entire column plus make them show more than the top five headlines, if I wanted.

Finally, somewhat related, Alltop’s pages for what the popular Twitters and FriendFeed people are saying is interesting, too. I just wish those pages would say clearly at the top what’s included on them and why.