The world's best real-time and blog search engine doesn't belong to Google or Twitter. It now belongs to Meltwater Group, the SAAS company best known for its social media monitoring suite, as it now owns IceRocket.com, the under-appreciated but outstanding search tool I use multiple times daily, and recently recommended to Techipedia's readers looking for top tricks and tools. IceRocket, known by many folks mostly due to its being funded by Mark Cuban, has been working with Meltwater for a few years, and had previously provided data to other Meltwater acquisitions, including Jitterjam and Buzzgain (where I was an advisor).Blake Rhodes, the one man band behind IceRocket, told me by email today that the service will continue to feed into these Meltwater properties, and will leverage both to make the service more robust, "hopefully getting more data in house, rather than relying on any 3rd parties," he said.
So why should you care? Because Icerocket quietly has built the most accurate, thorough and responsive real-time and blog search engine I have ever seen. I told everyone at the end of 2009 that they were tough to top and included them in my top ten list of sites I use every day at the end of 2010. You know me - I always go to the mat for services I think are the very best, and Icerocket is high quality. No other real-time search engine that I have tried gives me such comprehensive results in a lightweight format across as many properties as they do.
Rhodes will continue as an employee of Meltwater going forward as the company integrates its newest acquisition. I for one hope the site remains open and available, because to be honest, nobody else has got this nailed.
Disclosure: Theoretically, due to having advisor shares in BuzzGain, I am a Meltwater shareholder in some minor way which I have zero visibility into.