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.

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I just finished compiling the results of an email-based survey I sent out last month to readers of The Information Advisor. Readers are primarily hands-on business information professionals, such as corporate librarians and market researchers.

While the survey response pool was small, and 100 readers filled out the questionnaire, we did find several interesting results. The highlights of the survey, which asked questions on topics ranging from most commonly used sources, to the biggest barriers in performing excellent business research, and new roles and duties for business information professionals, will be excerpted in our March issue.

One question that we asked our readers was to tell us which sources or vendors that they trusted the most and which they trusted the least.

The most trusted source Information Advisor readers named was Factiva, mentioned by about 32% of the respondents. Factiva was followed by LexisNexis (28%) and then Dialog (18%). The least trusted source, by a fairly wide margin was D&B, named by about 12%.

I wasn’t surprised by these answers–Factiva seems to continuously do everything well and thoughtfully, and has rightly earned the trust of business researchers. D&B has long been plagued with doubts from the information professional community, primarily regarding the timeliness and accuracy of its company directory listings.

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The best detailed discussion to date on what’s happening with all the changes occurring with Thomson’s breaking up, moving, and selling some of its market research, analyst research, and news databases from its Thomson Business Intelligence (TBI) division can be found in Barbara Quint’s article in the January 22nd Information Today NewsBreaks here

That article closes with this quote from analyst John Blossom:

Unfortunately Thomson Business Intelligence never quite coalesced into the integrated offerings for market verticals and functional verticals that other business information offerings have formed over the past few years. Instead the individual cultures and architectures of each of the product offerings under the umbrella were never put aside in full and wound up being an ‘old’ Thomson division of stand-alone offerings under a common sales umbrella. … Best of luck to everyone in this deal, in the end better things are bound to happen as a result of this move.

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Like appending every scandal with the word “gate” to it, now it seems that every new approach or revision to anything at all these days gets the “2.0″ moniker. Hey, I mean, did you know that now there are even socks 2.0?

But one area where there’s clearly a legit use of the “2.0″ buzzword (even if you don’t like the whole Web 2.0 moniker) is in the area of market research. Traditional market research has always been about processes like in-person focus groups, mail and phone surveys, quantitative data collection and so on. While all of this is still important, these days the interesting action is how market researchers can collect unsolicited and naturalistic conversation occurring on the Web, as described in this recent New York Times article. (This will all be part of the book I’m working on titled The Art of Strategic Listening, on how to do credible market research and track emerging trends by paying careful attention to discussions on blogs)

Here’s an interesting take on what it means for market research to be going in the 2.0 direction, it’s called, Research 2.0., written by Ray Poynter on his pretty cool blog The Future Place.

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