Some people look at Google with disdain, they worry about privacy or they worry about market domination or other such things.
I’m a Google fan. I use their products all the time. And I applaud them for taking big bets like Android as well as their approach to deploying smaller, incremental apps from Google Labs and other product teams.
But don’t get me wrong. Google has left many areas open for innovation by other companies. The list is long and attractive.
I think social search is one of those areas.
For example if I do a Google search on ‘LeBron James’, the first result I’m going to see is the Wikipedia entry for LJ.
That’s helpful if I wanted to see his bio.
But that doesn’t tell me what my friends think about LeBron James or what people are thinking & talking about right now and in the moment.
Twitter Search provides something different. Twitter Search is a real time social search experience that shows you what the millions of Twitter users are talking about right now. If you do a Twitter Search on LeBron James you will see things like tweet.
I love that.
Another example is OneRiot. OneRiot (formerly known as Me.dium) launched their social search product yesterday. While Twitter Search tells you what people are talking about right now, OneRiot will show you where people are surfing online right now (results are based on the current popularity among their 2million user base). So a LeBron James search will show this result.
I’m quite biased of course. We are investors in both Twitter and OneRiot.
But I encourage you to check out these search engines even if you aren’t a Twitter or OneRiot user.
And let me know what you think.