Detecting sentiment in content on the web, including Tweets and news articles is becoming an increasingly popular way of interpreting data. With that it mind, RankSpeed is launching a search tool that does a sentiment analysis of Tweets and blogs.
RankSpeed lets you search for any keyword or tag on a website and attach a sentiment to the search. So you can use the emotional concepts of good, useful, easy, secure, and RankSpeed will then give you search results of blog posts that match the subject and sentiment. For each result, the engine computes the percentage of bloggers that have said a particular product or site is good or easy or useful. If it sounds confusing, that’s because it is. It’s a little easier to understand when you take a look at the site.
You can also filter your search by blogs that are considered (by RankSpeed) to be more useful, easy and so on. A website is ranked as more useful than another if its name is more often associated with “useful”, “helpful” or other synonyms in blog posts and tweets.
For example, I did a search for “good” Twitter Apps. The top result was Identi.ca, a microblogging site similar to Twitter. Hmmm, that’s not quite a perfect match for “good” Twitter Apps. But when you do a search for “popular” Twitter Apps, the top results include Tweetdeck, UberTwitter and other common Twitter apps.
While RankSpeed says its search engine tracks 3 million websites and blogs, it’s obvious that the site’s technology is not perfect by any means. Another feature that is missing is the ability to see the “sources” (or blogs and Tweets) of the results. If I saw that Tweetdeck was rated as the most popular Twitter app in the search results, I probably would want to see who found it popular in order to validate the results. Although the site provides an interesting way to search blogs and Tweets for sentiment-driven keywords, it won’t replace Google anytime soon.
Searching for “obama” and good gives a 10% good score from barackobama.com. Fail.
Search for most terms that I know are in fact pretty popular in Twittersphere / Blogosphere returns 0 results. #fail
Searching for “webmail” and find gmail and zimbra on top of the list… it seems quite good!
Ryan, barackobama.com is #4, not so bad…
Since when do we measure search engines by sentiments like “not so bad”?
Also, 10% of sources thought it was a good resource? And of the 23 sources they drew on, the top one was “your thighs do the barackobama and tell us some lies “, which obviously doesn’t mention barackobama.com.
It’s a cool idea but a useless implementation.
I don’t get it. Seems a bit schlocky to me. They need to clean up the interface and and hold back on the google ads a bit.
Working with sentiment is tough. There is always much subjectivity with semantic analysis.
For practical real time search results simply grouped into positive Tips and negative piTs I’ve found http://feeltiptop.com an easy way to cut through the Twitter spam, delivering a variety of fast results with quality content and people to interact with.
Results are very good with popular queries
Although the site provides an interesting way to search blogs and Tweets for sentiment-driven keywords, it won’t replace Google anytime soon.
Will this happen? RankSpeed’s speed could never reach Google.