Gazerk: First Vertical Social Media Search Engine?

Paul Kedrosky mentions Gazerk. which provides search within the (video) game vertical. Although not explicitly so, by serving results in the gaming vertical it effectively becomes the first search engine which provides results from more than one social media corpus (blogs, message boards and reviews).

This is a significant change from engines which are tied to a single data source (e.g. BlogPulse, Technorati, BoardTracker, OMGILI, etc.)

A search for 'half life' (a very popular PC game) produces 191, 938 results in the games category, 1, 590 in reviews, 1, 636 in reviews, 2, 409 in screenshots, 3, 760 in forums, and 103 in blogs. I'm not yet sure of the precise meaning of all of these categories (especially 'games'), but the aggregation of reviews, blogs and forums is very interesting.

Gazerk is 'powered by Kosmix' which is a portal into a number of different search verticals with a similar look and feel to Gazerk: Health, Video Games, Finance, Travel and US Politics.

Comments

[Mark Johnson]

Kosmix uses our Web crawl as our primary source of data. We're not sourcing blogs, reviews, or message boards through any special means. Our technology allows us to know what a page is about so we can separate content into different categories.

[Matthew Hurst]

Mark,

Thanks for your comment. I understand that Gaserk is not explicitly targetting these source types. My intention was to indicate that by virtue of the vertical, which has a high volume of content on boards, review sites and blogs, the search engine approximated an explicit social media search engine. In addition, the results on Gazerk do explicitly break out the results via the source type (blog, forum, etc.) which does suggest that they have focused at least their results system in a manner aligned with my suggestion.

[andy]

just to point out: http://wazap.de and the http://wazap.jp are the first verticals for gaming on the net ;-) - ok they are german or japanese, but they were first...