A class of mobile “help” or “answer engines” has arisen as an alternative to traditional search engines. They hold out the promise more efficient, relevant or direct responses to queries than search engines can provide on the small screen. In several cases they involve the use of live human agents or a community of users to answer questions. Examples include Aardvark, ChaCha and kgb Answers. This “community answers” capability is also nascent within Facebook and Twitter.

Also in this category is the yet to launch “personal assistant” Siri, which taps artificial intelligence rather that real people and is starting on the iPhone but will extend to the PC as well.

ChaCha, which is free and ad supported, can accept text or voice queries and provides a text response back. It uses part-time human agents to answer questions. ChaCha began life as a “social search engine” on the PC and morphed into text-based mobile answers service. More recently the company launched mobile and online coupons to diversify its revenues.

Competitor kgb is also text-based but today launched iPhone and Android apps that offer a game-like experience around the core answers offering. Its model requires consumers to pay $0.99 per question and it doesn’t have ads. However the iPhone and Android apps provide access to a range of features and content for free.

Peer-to-peer help or answer engine Aardvark, which now is calling itself a social search engine, has multiple entry points: Web, Twitter, IM and the iPhone.

Mosio was also an early entrant in this segment but has shifted its focus somewhat to the enterprise market. It still maintains a mobile answer community however.

There are and have been many “Q&A” sites on the PC, exemplified by Yahoo Answers. There are also numerous “social search engines.” They’ve had varying degrees of success but are not widely regarded as true alternatives to Google, Yahoo or Bing. However on a mobile device, where there is less screen space and less patience, there is an opportunity to develop a differentiated offering. Accordingly, these mobile answers services are more directly — or by default — positioned as alternatives to search engines. And consumers may be willing to consider them.

I recently did an informal comparison of a number of these services and Google and found that there was no clear winner; each had strengths but none emerged as a clear victor. Yet these mobile,  human-powered competitors must provide a richer, faster or more engaging experience than conventional search engines more generally if they hope to succeed over the long term.

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. 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.

Nielsen offers a blog post that shows the various ways that people discover content online. Search is at the top, followed by “portals” (which feature search boxes); at the other end are blogs and social networks. However Nielsen argues that certain categories of people are increasingly social media tools as content discovery sources:

We saw the power of opinions posted online in our global study earlier this year about trust in advertising, and the point came up again in our recent findings. Social media is becoming a core product research channel. Almost 15 percent of Socializers most trusted information they found on blogs when researching new purchases online, while nearly 20 percent trusted most the information they found on message boards.

Then the provocative question is asked: “So are social networks replacing portals or search engines?” Nielsen then says:

Perhaps. Regardless, if we don’t understand and address people feeling increasingly alienated by the amount of information on the Internet, and the need for a human guide, yes, your favorite social network (or something like it) will become the next great content gateway.

But it’s not an either/or, zero-sum situation. There may be some number of queries that people pose to their networks before or in addition to their use of search engines. Overall, “word of mouth” on social media sites is a complement to search engine usage. No doubt social media tools will continue to grow as content sources; however I don’t think we’ll see Facebook or Twitter replace Google or Bing any time soon.

A version of local search has existed on Twitter for some time: asking your followers for local recommendations about places to stay, things to do and so on. One can also use Twitter search itself, though it’s very hit and miss in terms of the quality of results. And there are also the third party search engines that use the Twitter API. Yet those typically produce the same uneven results.

But in what is a first (to my knowledge) Idearc’s Superpages has brought true local search to Twitter through Twitter.com/sp411. Twitter users can now conduct searches of the Superpages database and get results as direct messages on  Twitter to their local queries. (They can also retweet and share them, which makes it that much more interesting.)

Here’s the process:

1. You follow sp411 and then it will automatically follow you a few seconds later
2. You then send a direct message to sp411 (”d sp411″) with a query and location. Example: pizza in Seattle, “d sp411 pizza Seattle”.
3. Results will appear in an all the Twitter notification places (email, SMS and direct message).

Here’s what it looks like:

Just a couple of seconds after the direct message is sent you see something like this:

If you click through on any of these links you are taken to a business profile page on Superpages’ site:

After the initial set up process, in which you follow sp411 and it follows you, the service proves to be quite useful especially if you’re looking for a specific business phone number or address. It’s also an example of Superpages proactively taking its data and local search capabilities out to where users are, not unlike what many companies have been doing for some time on Facebook.

And in case it isn’t self evident, this also makes Twitter/sp411 a local-mobile search tool as well.

There are a couple of other Twitter bots out there but this is the first local search tool on Twitter. I would imagine, as people see and start to use this, we’re going to see a bunch of vertical and other search tools employing similar functionality. And as they start to emerge they make Twitter a much more interesting and useful site.

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 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.

While the major search engines continue to sit in the proverbial driveway, real-time search is in high gear and speeding along without a speed bump in site. And with Twitter offering what’s becoming the default real-time web experience (more so than Facebook or FriendFeed, in my opinion), it’s no wonder that Twitter search engines are starting to pop up on a regular basis.

Earlier this month I profiled the new OneRiot Twitter search engine, and now via Louis Gray, we learn about Twazzup, another new entry into the Twitter search race. Where OneRiot is focused on sorting through the Twitter noise and helping users find just the links and web content that people are talking about, Twazzup takes everything Twitter has to offer — noise and all — and lets users find what interests them most.

Here’s a look at the Twazzup interface (you can click to see the larger version on Flickr) after a search this morning for “U2″:

A stream of tweets shows up in the main content block on the left. These are shown in real time, although it appears that Twitter is running slow this morning — both Twazzup and Twitter’s own search engine are showing tweets about 15-20 minutes delayed as I write this. Twazzup shows recommended search refinements in small, gray boxes above the real time stream; a series of U2 concert tickets went on sale today, so some of the refinements include “vegas,” “houston,” “tickets,” and “muse” (one of the opening acts).

Twazzup’s unique content is to the right:

• Popular Tweets – this needs work; the example in the screenshot is from a coupon service and has nothing to do with U2. It’s there because ‘u2′ appears in the shortened URL. (Seems like an invitation for spamming via custom short URLs.)
• Top Trendmakers – accounts whose tweets are driving conversation
• Related Photos – related photos from Twitpic, updated in real time
• Most Popular Links – links most often included in tweets related to the keyword

Aside from the “Popular Tweets” issue I mentioned above, Twazzup provides a good Twitter search experience — and one that’s different enough from others to make it a valuable addition to the real-time search engine field.

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 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.

Twitter is a search engine after all — or make that a “discovery engine.” The folks at Twitter are saying that the experiment with integrating a search box into Twitter pages will rolled out with some interesting twists and new dimensions. It won’t be at the top of the page, but rather on the sidebar:

Currently, a small subset of Twitter users are trying this new search feature in the sidebar of their Twitter home page. When you do a search, you don’t go to another page, the relevant tweets instantly show up where you’d expect them to—right on your home page where tweets love to be.

Twist number one, “saved searches”:

If there’s a search you want to do on a regular basis, you can “save” the search. That will place the word or term permanently in your sidebar for easy access. So if you want to know what people are saying about the city you live in, the products you use, or just something weird, it becomes a link on your home page.

This notion of persistent search or, perhaps more analogously alerts, is not new but its integration into Twitter provides a potentially useful way to monitor certain kinds of terms (think of all the PR people who will monitor their clients or brands, etc.). Apparently the tweets that will be revealed when accessing those saved searches are real-time posts/discussions — literally happening right now. It’s not entirely clear what happens to relevant search content that is a day or a week old. That great restaurant recommendation or other revelation might have occurred in the recent past when you were asleep or taking your kids to the movies.

Twist number two, “trends”:

Trends are words or phrases being referenced with more frequency suggesting that something interesting might be happening. When you click on a trend link, you can read the tweets and find out what’s up. Trends is in beta—but it has potential.

Trends will also be  in the sidebar apparently and will be about the Twittergeist rather than individual search queries. Danny has written a couple of extensive posts on Twitter as search tool and the rise of “help engines” (Twitter and beyond). Matt McGee’s got another Twitter-related search post that will appear later today.

Twitter with these changes is moving much more squarely into the mainstream world of search — and discovery.

Gerry Campbell was at Alta Vista and later spent several years in the search unit of AOL before joining Reuters as “President/Global Head of Search & Content Technologies.” Among other roles, he was an advisor to Summize, acquired last year by Twitter. And now Campbell has joined “real-time” search service Collecta as CEO.

Collecta hasn’t launched yet. But Campbell made clear to me that he didn’t see it as a “Google killer” or replacement for web search. Collecta is focused on the emerging arena, now getting lots of buzz, called “real-time” search: delivering content within minutes of it being generated — largely on blogs and social media sites.

Campbell and I spoke about the challenges of doing it well and the potential business models and industries that would be interested. He says he’s been thinking about the space for quite some time and has a number of ideas about how to improve the experience. While it might work as a buzz tracker or popularity index, Twitter Search is relatively poor as a practical tool in my opinion. I believe however that there’s a significant opportunity in mobile for real-time search or a variation on that idea: help/answer engines. But there are clearly other applications as well.

It’s clear that “real-time” search is a new category that will continue to attract attention and investment. But it’s not clear whether genuinely useful products and services will emerge yet (though some would aleady dispute that).

A new tool takes us one small step closer to bringing real-time search, i.e., Twitter search results, to the Google interface. It’s called Twitter Search Results on Google, and it adds the most recent five tweets for your search query above Google’s regular search results, like this:

(The tool is actually a Greasemonkey script for Firefox. But don’t let that intimidate you. Personal note: If I can learn how to install and use Greasemonkey scripts, anyone can!)

While Google is able to index content within minutes of publishing, there continues to be a push for improved searching of the real-time information that a service like Twitter provides. We’ve written before about Twitter being faster to spread earthquake news than the US Geological Survey. In January, Danny asked why Google and Yahoo don’t offer Twitter search.

A Yahoo developer created Tweetnews, a separate search engine that uses Twitter conversations as a ranking signal for timely news items. But this new Greasemonkey script is, to my knowledge, the first such tool that puts fresh Twitter search results right on Google itself.

ReadWriteWeb offered some suggested improvements, like a link to the Twitter search RSS feed and the ability to see more than five tweets. Those are good, and I’d also like to be able to remove certain Twitter users from showing up in these new results.

Meanwhile, on a somewhat related note, CNET News writes today about Twitter’s plans to upgrade its own search technology. There’s a screenshot from Twitter investor Fred Wilson that shows things like “Matching users” and “Featured user.” CNET points out, though, that Wilson’s screenshot might be older than one recently shown on the Twitter blog. Still, it’s worth looking at as a possible peek into how Twitter plans to upgrade its own search capabilities.