I’m in the process of sorting through all sorts and varieties of specialized and interesting “social media” search engines for businesses that want to identify trends from blog conversations and other consumer media sites. So far there are two that seem to warrant further investigation: Serph and TagFetch.

Serph, which is still in beta, is a kind of metasearch search engine that specializes in searching multiple social search sites at once: these includes: Technorati, Digg, YouTube, Flickr, Google Blog Search, Bloglines, and Newsvine. It clearly is a value-added type search, as these are all potentially valuable places to find conversations that are not represented by doing a standard Google search, Technorati search, etc. individually

You can keep up with developments on Serph by reading its blog

TagFetch is also a social media meta search site, but it just searches specifically on tags–sites that it searches include: Bloglines, Technorati, Sphere, YouTube, and others. There’s a nice attractive interface that visually shows results from all of the sites at once. My only problem here was that a few sites always “timed out,” which seemed to be a regular issue in my initial test searches.

I’m still in the early stages of checking these out, but so far they are the most intriguing ones of the new batch of social search sites that I’ve come across to date.

Technorati Tags: Serph

Technorati Tags: TagFetch

Technorati Tags: Search Engines