Buzzilla now crawls Google+
In the month since Google launched its highly-anticipated social network site, Google+, it has attracted a wide range of users who now use the site as part of their daily routine. As of yesterday, Buzzilla, the social media monitoring and research company, began crawling Google+, collecting the various postings made there by a wide range of people. This places Buzzilla in the lead among companies able to serve their clients by automatically identifying, extracting and analyzing the content produced by Google+ users.
Buzzilla had already established its crawling capacity in the web's other popular conversation arenas, such as Facebook, Twitter, various forums, and all the news sites. The information mined from these sites enables Buzzilla to perform qualitative and quantitative analyses, allowing commercial and public organizations to track web conversation about their activities. The end result is better understanding of consumer behavior.
The ability to crawl Google+ was only achieved after an arduous development process. "There is no standard way today to crawl Google+ the way we crawl Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites," explained Yoav Pridor, Buzzilla CEO. "But all this effort is worthwhile, however, because companies in the modern market simply cannot disregard consumer conversation wherever it takes place – in Google's social network or elsewhere."
An initial survey of the crawled profiles revealed that approximately 30% of them are active and sharing information on Google+ on a daily basis. "We are only looking at public posts. Under no circumstances will we monitor postings that are only shared in private circles," Pridor explained.
