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Sentiment search is at the cutting edge of web search.
Emotions or sentiments get expressed through ideas, opinions, criticisms, and sarcasm.
The web is its melting pot.
It gets expressed en masse in blogs and forums.
Now Twitter has deepened the ocean of sentiment.
Sentiment analysis or opinion mining has long been a part of data analysis.
Surveys and polls are the old world tools for measuring the pulse of the crowd.
Web 2.0 brought in the flood.
Those little thumbs up or thumbs down icons you see next to a web entry are sentiment capturing tools.
This simple barometer may be too narrow for the full range of human emotions.
The still evolving sentiment search engines show this weakness in the results they display.
So, why bother with sentiments and sentiment search engines?
Because sentiment search can flesh out a general idea of what’s good or bad about something.
It can give us a springboard to dive deeper into the reasons behind those emotions.
It also gives us another tool to make sense of the informational chaos that’s around us.
So, let’s try out some sentiment search tools and see if we can catch the moods.
Rankspeed [No Longer Available]
We kick off our list with Rankspeed.
Rankspeed collects results from the blogosphere and Twittersphere based on keywords and sentiments.
Results are expressed as percentages matching the sentiments.
sentiment), by a time period, or by relevance.
Sentiments are also indicated by little colored circles next to the results.
Other tracking filters include -Sources, Top Users, Top Hashtags,andTop Keywords.
Power users can set up email alerts and also download the results in a CSV/Excel file.
CrowdEye
CrowdEye (Beta) is a real time social search engine that’s based on Twitter.
As it has access to Twitter’s own Firehose of data feeds, results are accurate and real time.
What’s of interest to sentiment searchers is the Sentiment filter tucked on the sidebar.
Twitter Sentiment
Twitter Sentiment started its life as a Natural Language Processing project at Stanford University.
The site’sAboutpage goes into the details of the science behind the engine.
TheAnalyzepage of Tweetsentiments lets you examine the emotional health of a user or a topic.
WhatDoesTheInternetThink
WhatDoesTheInternetThink.net is like one of those flash Gallup polls that tap into public opinion.
The web tool searches the internet for the global opinion on what the world thinks.
It takes your search term and returns results as Positive, Negative or Indifferent.
The tool searches the web using Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Twitter.
And it’s slick too.
That’s why it’s not meant for rigorous search.
Do a search on the site and you might like their fun sentiment.
RaveRants
RaveRants also takes a simple approach with Twitter sentiments.
Your search results are separated by how manyraveabout it and how manyrantsit gets.
you’re free to also pour in your sentiment to the stream.
Jodange
Jodange is not a search engine.
But it has tools which catch opinions that are flying about in our social media.
I would have loved to review one of its gadgets calledTop of Mindthat does sentiment analysis.
Unfortunately, it’s not free, so I will briefly mention their free bookmarklet -Opinion Lens.
Opfine
Opfine is a nice example of sentiment analysis going to work on market data.
One day, maybe our traditional media will also work on the same lines.
Most of us will hardly use these tools for studious research.
That’s my sentiment.
Do let us know.
