Today is party time at ContextVoice / uberVU as we’re officialy launching our Search API as part of the ContextVoice suite of APIs.

Why another Search API? Don’t we have blog search and Twitter search already?

Yes, we do. But we do something completely different. We do conversational search. A conversation is usually a story (blog post, news article) and all its related comments from all over the Web. So a blog post that has comments on Digg, has been retweeted by people and has got comments on FriendFeed is, for us, a single conversation.

Blog search only indexes blog posts and leaves out comments of any kind. And it’s usually slow.

Twitter indexes only tweets that contain the keyword you’re searching for. It’s close to real-time.

We index both the story content and all the distributed comment content and we return as a result complete conversations. And we’re close to real-time. The best of both worlds.

And this is useful because…?

The Web right now is all about conversations. However, until now, search engines have mostly returned results by relevance (Google), recency (Twitter) or some sort of combination (blog search). But out of those recent results, which one is more important? Where’s all the attention? What’s hot right now as opposed to what’s just fresh?

What’s very important to know is what Conversations (not blog posts) are HOT right now – so you can participate and make decisions in close to real-time. That’s what our API is focusing on.

What to expect from our search

Full conversation search. Because we don’t index just page content but all the reactions and comments from all over the web our results offer a better understanding of the conversation than a regular blog search. The blog post may be about the Google OS, but the comments are mostly about Microsoft. Our Search makes that visible to you.

Close To Real-Time results. We monitor the top social media sites in realtime so if something happens there, you know instantly.

Filtering options. We can show you the most relevant, the newest or the hottest conversations. We calculate the hotness based on conversation acceleration – how many reactions it got in the last time-frame. So a conversation with 10 reactions in the last minute may be hotter than one with 1500 reactions distributed over a month. But the hot conversation matters more, because that’s the one that has the attention and momentum.

What to build with the API

The Search we provide can be used in a lot of products and dashboards. uberVU.com, for example, is entirely built on top of this API. You should check it out as it’s a great starting point for what’s possible with the Search API.

Social media dashboards – want to search entire conversations for your brand of product and get an insight into what’s hot right now and where the attention is – whether on Twitter, FriendFeed or blogs? The Search API is a great place to start

Memetrackers – interested in building a meme site for the NFL or the latest gadgets? Just use the Search API and get the hottest conversations about that topic in close to real-time.

Community management projects – want to bring fresh content and community conversations from all over the Web to your site or community? Search for the topics you’re interested in with our Search API and expose the hottest conversations on your site. We don’t just get the stories, we get the comments. And the comments are the most important part of a community. People comment if other people have commented. That’s what you want.

Financial analytics – search for your favorite company and graph comments to the evolution of the stock quote. You may be intrigued at what you find.

These are just some starting ideas, I’m sure there’s a lot more you can think of.