Really. What’s the point of being social on the Web if you can’t figure out what the social is? Fortunately, there are third party developers more than willing to improve on the rather lame search functions built into most social venues. That is a good thing.

MakeUseOf (link) highlights some of those search engines. I have used a couple, but there are some new ones in the list that I am looking forward to trying out. You can search mutiple sites all at once with Socialmention (link). Check out their ratings for strenth, sentiment, passion and reach of a given search term.  Find other peoples’ social life with yoName (link). It serves up an impressive list of profiles in tabs for many of the most popular sites. Like graphs and checkboxes? Check out snitch.name (link) – a social white pages of sorts which returns a lot of results broken down by social categories. For Google-powered social search, check out Followen (link) and Google Social Search (link). Samepoint (link) looks at social interaction from the vantage point of conversations – it will show the social conversations based on your search term topic.

There are more than a few that didn’t make MakeUseOf’s list. Some have been mentioned before in the Studio, such as 123People (link), Scoopler (link), and OneRiot (link).

No matter which engine you choose, these options can provide you with great topical, personal profile and real-time information to assist your own social web efforts. Monitor your own brand, your near and dear topics, and the brands of competitors and clients more effectively with these search tools!