Searching Social Media

So an interesting question came up and I learned something. And maybe you can help.

How do you search social media?

Hashtags were added by users – and later adopted by the companies, and have been a growing thing. From their start on Twitter, you can now see and use them on Google+, Tumblr, Facebook, and other places. And of course, there’s the tags on blogs and other things that are user-generated attempts at keywords and searchability. However, even if we assume that what you are looking for are posts where users are self-defining their content – say, with the upcoming Emerald City Comic Con in Seattle this weekend (#eccc) – how do you best search these things?

So with the question came this link, so I can’t say I found it myself: http://guides.library.cornell.edu/socialmedia They don’t necessarily have all the answers, but they did post the important question: Twitter only has the last 10 days searchable! Living in a 140-character world may be bad, but living in a world with a ten-day life-span? That’s really rough. 

Twitter isn’t easily archived and searchable?

Screenshot from the Wayback Machine http://archive.org/web/

Nope, it looks like not. And that’s like a lot of social media – it’s blocked off behind passwords, membership, and privacy. As a private individual, that’s great. If I’m a brand hoping my public page can be easily found, or my trending hashtag can be searched… that’s a different problem.

Let’s think bigger, as well… some major world events lately have turned to social media to get the word out. Uprisings in Egypt, for instance, or more recently, events in the Ukraine. Finding this information is hard, and for a researcher in five years? Researching these sorts of things may be impossible.

Much of the problem is the quantity of data being generated… millions of users who, if they post one thing a day, is still millions of posts a day. On each social media site. Do you also archive, or search, comments? Reblogs? All of the activity on the post? I can see the problems. And so have others… they’re trying to make a way to do it.

Social Media Search Engines

So it looks like some specific Social Media related Search Engines have sprung up. Several are mentioned in the Cornell Library guide, but I found a few others, and there are other blog posts out there on the subject – I found this one pretty helpful. On many of them, I find that sadly, an advanced Google Search is one of the best methods – limiting to a specific site, for instance. If you just search a hashtag on Google, you tend to get link to the various social media sites and their individual sites – not necessarily results.

If that’s not enough for you, then you want a social media search engine like Social Searcher. While this seems to mainly only search Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, it has an interesting three-column results from these three, and then lots of search limiting options.

Or there’s a site like Social Mention, which sure sounds powerful, but the number of results I seem to get with it is a bit odd. However, this one is exciting because it has an honest-to-goodness advanced search you can use to limit what sorts of sites you are looking at, limit terms, exclude users, and other things. Not bad, not bad. But not great. I get back searches that talk about hundreds of results – from out of millions of tweets?

The problem is, I doubt these search engines are actually archiving the information either – they’re just searching what’s readily available, or recent, and are basically just skimming the top of the deep sea of social media.

Any suggestions?

How do you search social media? Do you search social media? If you wanted to go back and find that hilarious post – where would you start? Let me know in the comments below!