Very Recent & Addictomatic: Finding What People Are Buzzing About Right Now!

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 […]

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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’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.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Danny Sullivan
Contributor
Danny Sullivan was a journalist and analyst who covered the digital and search marketing space from 1996 through 2017. He was also a cofounder of Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land and MarTech, and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo and MarTech events. He retired from journalism and Third Door Media in June 2017. You can learn more about him on his personal site & blog He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

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