With the volume of information available on social media sites increasing rapidly, the need for effective search tools is greater than ever before.  Users need ways to sift through the “garbage” on the Internet to find information that is relevant to their search – both on topic and in the desired format.

Search engines are evolving, making the process of finding information easier and ensuring that results are more useful.  The upsurge in information generated through sites specializing in social media is making the need for search engine evolution even more important.

Here are a few sites that are making the search for information on social media sites easier:

• Wink.com: Claims to be the first “social search engine” that “allows people to search across multiple social networks and find other people with similar interests.”  The site searches across social networking sites including: MySpace, Bebo and LinkedIn, and it claims to contain “over 100 million profiles”.  Search across social networks for interests, locations, screen names, names, etc.  Wink looks for information that other people have ranked as useful/relevant.  Users can  re-rank search results, bookmark sites they want to remember, and block results that aren’t relevant.  Users can also create “Collections” of the  most relevant sites on a particular topic and assign privacy settings to those “collections,” making collections available to the public, to designated groups of people, or keeping them private.  Collections labeled as “public” then turn up in the search results.
  
• Eurekster’s Swicki: Eurekster explains what a swicki is far better than I ever could, “Swicki is a natural extension of personal publishing on the web. Just as you can create a webpage, blog, or podcast, now you can publish a community powered search engine, tailored to produce only the targeted search results that you and your community want!  A swicki shows a buzz cloud of what is hot in your community and makes it easy to find the best content, news and info on the web.”
• Google Blog Search, Technorati, Blogpulse, and IceRocket are great resources for searching for information contained within blogs.
• ClipBlast, Blinkx, and Google Video are all great sites for searching video.  Internet TV Search Engine is a Swicki that does what it says on the tin.

If you’re interested in Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Optimization, check out the following article (and the links within it): SMO: The Next Phase Of SEO.

If you have a favorite search engine for social media, that you’d like to recomend, send a comment!