Social Search has outperformed traditional search methodologies on web. It’s emerging as the most popular way of searching relevant data. It’s getting momentum as people are relying more on recommendations than on machine based approaches and rank algorithms. A genuine approach – isn’t it? Relying on humans is back in fashion. Recently Facebook surpassed Google in driving traffic to other websites and that shows the way social search is becoming a dominant force in search business.

At Context Mine, we wanted to make social search very simple. Our purpose was to track content which is socially popular. We also wanted to prioritize this content so that if users don’t want to crawl through all the content, they can just glance through most popular ones.

When we started tracking it, we noticed that getting most socially popular content is not as easy as it sounds. People are talking about same content at several places. They are sharing, transferring, forwarding URLs in different forms. Several URL shorteners are increasing the complexity. We have services like TinyURL, SnipURL, Bit.Ly, and lots more. Though, at Context Mine, we had one advantage that we were already tracking data from 100+ social media websites, and our next task was to find similar content / URL through several untiny, unsnipping methods. Counting social mentions of these URLs and ranking them for facilitating users were other tasks which we did before including this new feature in Context Mine. More…