As a follow up to the post “How To Monitor Your Online Reputation With Yahoo! Pipes“, I wanted to share a few of my favorite social search engines. These selections are special because they allow you to monitor your important keywords and phrases across both small and large social media sites…free!

So here we go, my 8 favorite social search engines:

Social Mention

One of my favorite social search engines is SocialMention.com.  This beauty of this tool is that they aggregate search results from over 50 different social media hubs.  On the results pages you will receive a “Social Rank” for the word or phrase searched. If you use FireFox, don’t forget to install the “Browser Search” Plugin.

Whostalkin

Another of my favorites is WhosTalkin.com. Once you’ve searched a keyword or phrase you’ll arrive at the results page with a mashup of search results. If you want to search just one site, click the corresponding name on the left side to filter results. If you use FireFox, don’t forget to install the “Browser Search” Plugin.

Serph

Serph’s slogan is “Track buzz in real time.” This social search starts with a busier search interface but does provide videos and images in results. They should know something about monitoring; afterall the creators do specialize in social media marketing and reputation management.  If you use FireFox, don’t forget to install the “Browser Search” Plugin.

Tusavvy

Tusavvy has a simple search interface, using “using socially annotated web data” as results.  I’ve had mixed results with their search, but none the less I think its valuable enough to mention here.

Zudos

I love the Zudos results page layout. They’ve meshed the search results into what feels like a dashboard.  It also gives a holistic feel. See groupings such as blogger buzz, social videos, highest voted stories, social bookmarks, mainstream media and podcasts.

Sputtr

Sputtr takes a different approach to the aggregation we’ve seen from other search engines. They have you select the search engine you would like to use, and then it directs the users over to the results page. Want more search choices? Easily add more option to the page.

Cluuz

The search results on Cluuz are displayed in list format with all associated tags and images highly visible.  Also to the right of search results you’ll see a semantic graph of the “retrieved documents and extracted entities.”

Do you have a favorite not listed here? Please share in the comments below.