BuzzLook.ru, a new social media monitoring system, was launched earlier this month. The site allows searches for keywords on such popular Russian and international resources as social networks Vkontakte.ru and Facebook, hosting sites Youtube and Flickr, blogging platform LiveJournal, as well as on Twitter.
BuzzLook’s founders were inspired by such systems as SocialMention and Radian6. In Russia, such services are already provided by Wobot, but the latter works on a fee-basis.
BuzzLook.ru provides a free service. No registration is needed. To simplify the perception of information, search results from each source are presented in separate blocks.
EWDN’s tests showed BuzzLook works well when searching for terms such as the names of famous people or works of art, such as “Bill Gates” or “The Lord of the Rings”. In other cases, when the subject is not as well known, the relevance of BuzzLook’s search results is quite low.
While the best search results were obtained from Youtube, Facebook searches yielded less results. The mechanism of the search engine is not transparent. When you try to repeat your search query directly through Facebook or other social sites, results differ significantly.
The problem of relevance is made even more acute by the fact that users of social networks often use slang, publish unsubstantiated information, and communicate in jest — all things the social networks were created for. To increase the relevance of search results, the creators of BuzzLook should significantly improve semantic search and information sorting.
According to BuzzLook’s founders, improvements will be made in stages. Among the current directions of R&D is social media information analysis, including its interpretation and split in time.
Sources: BuzzLook Blog, CNews, Vkontakte
