Social search is gaining quiet a bit of momentum these days. Social search is rising in popularity for about the same reasons Internet sentiment analysis, online buzz monitoring and brand reputation management are.

Consumer generated content is exploding. 44% of internet users are content creators (PEW) and a significant ratio of the top 10 results for more queries are consumer generated media such as blogs and other content sharing and discovery engines.

Advertisers follow consumers and the more content is authored by users, opinions and such, the more brands belong to the people. A few companies have developed pretty interesting data mining tools keeping track and monitoring buzz for ideas, trends, brands, products, and people … whatever online word-of-mouth channels.

Nielsen BuzzMetrics’BlogPulse – core competency is consumer generated media measurement – is pretty nice and easy to use. Simply plug in the term(s) for which you want to get the blogosphere pulse over the past 6 months. Although kind of hard to discover, you can also mouse over specific segments of graph and click through to date-specific posts. BuzzMetrics does a whole lot more such as tonality and such if you want to get serious. Sentiment analysis free but you get a feel for the sort of insights that can be retrieved if you also apply semantic categorization, alerts and such.

IceRockets is more of a blog search engine per se, along the lines of Technorati. IceRockets also surfaces the number of posts per day, average, and total posts over a certain period of time. “social search” has been getting about 10.12 posts a day.

Technorati provides a few more controls, and a smart syndication widget to leverage the blogging community and ramp up distribution, awareness. The Technorati UI surfaces a drop-down for many language, 3 authority levels to filter from, little, some and a lot, and finally a time option from 7 days to 360.
Posts that contain "social Search" per day for the last 30 days.