Samepoint: Social Conversations Search

I just discovered Samepoint courtesy of Killer Startups, and I was intrigued. A social conversation tracker? Sounds like something I want to check out. The site allows you to perform searches across the social web including Facebook, Friendster, Diigo, StumbleUpon, FriendFeed, Yelp, Twitter, MySpace, Simpy, Mister Wong, Blogmarks, and Reddit…but oddly, not Twitter. The site also searches blogs via Technorati and by performing searches on WordPress.com.

Snapshots

After you run a search, you can narrow down your options using the “Search Within” feature in the right sidebar. Here you can select any one of the sites to see just results from the site. Now, you would think that in doing so, the main page of search results would be updated to display the filtered items, but instead, you’re presented with a “snapshot” of searches from that site just beneath the “Search Within” box:

Snapshot of searches for “sarahintampa”

Searches

The main search results attempt to aggregate the conversations around a particular topic to show you the source and the comments of that particular convo. For testing purposes, I ran a few searches on some of my favorite terms: “Greasemonkey,” “Twitter apps,” “FriendFeed,” and, of course, the requisite vanity search for “sarahintampa.”

I have to say, the results were confusing.

I don’t know how it determines how to group conversations, but the results were always in the format of “search terms” + “other word(s).” For example, a search for “Twitter apps,” returned conversations around “Update Apps” + “twitter apps,” “Chrome” + “twitter apps,” “Android Apps” + “twitter apps,” etc. For Greasemonkey, I received results like “Active Digg Users” + “greasemonkey,” “Que Hay” + “greasemonkey,” and “having” + “greasemonkey.” And even when I looked at the search results for one of my keywords and the apparently arbitrary other word paired with it, I couldn’t determine where or how the conversation even related to the terms.

Search Results for “Greasemonkey”:

Can I just say HUH? Clearly I’m doing it wrong.

But I don’t know how to do it right, then. I thought a search engine, social or otherwise, was for querying on keywords. Apparently not. So how this site is actually useful – or rather, how it’s more useful than a Google search, a Twitter search, a Friendfeed search, or a Google Blog search, etc. – I’m not entirely sure.

For goodness sakes, if you are looking for a universal social search engine, just head to Yacktrack’s Chatter page instead.  It makes a lot more sense.