Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Newcomer semantic social search engine TipTopSearch—the brainchild of TipTop Technologies and ITC Infotech—wants to help make your Thanksgiving festivities just that much more special, with the help of the Twitter community. Head over here for its Thanksgiving search special. It uses its real-time sentiment, opinion and experience analytics, attribute sorting and semantic filtering functions, and ranking and relevancy algorithms to dish up ideas about what should be on the menu for the holiday to help hosts and hostesses whip their tables into shape.

The everyday goal of the recently launched service is to contextually deliver the insight and experiences of others that will help make people make decisions in their personal lives by taking advantage of the unstructured data that lives out there on the social web, as well as share that with their own networks.

For example, type in "Fantastic Mr. Fox" – what many parents will be doing with their home-from-school kids the day after Turkey Day—and you’ll get a set of results from current conversations underway on the subject at Twitter. Those results are based on the engine’s search of messages there, its “reads” of what is being said, and then its extraction of what it considers to be “the most interesting, useful and unique messages that match the search term,” according to its FAQ.

The returned messages are divided into two categories—Tips, which express something positive about the search term (“great film, brilliant, it makes me so happy, etc.), and piTs, which express a negative sentiment related to the search term. (The difficulty of sentiment analysis is plain here, as the piTs in the Mr. Fox example pulled up tweets that seemed to be more complaints about where it was showing and what times of day were inappropriate to see it rather than critiques of the film itself.) Users can further filter results by—or exclude them by—suggested terms particular to the query, and determine how far many days back in the Twitter world they’re willing to search tweets The service also has specific channels for sports, music, news, and so on.

But back to Thanksgiving. The search service has pulled together a list of the top 10 dishes, desserts, recipes and U.S. and international travel locations to start things off. It generates the top ten data from its semantic engine that the company says discovers people’s favorite dishes or travel plans from their tweets, aggregates the data and classifies the results into these categories. Concept clouds are generated the same way, displaying related topics for each area you can search on in the food or travel categories.

Clicking on Re-tip lets you share with your social network the fact that the top three main dish menu items for the big day are Fried Turkey, Honey Baked Ham, and, yes, Turducken. You can narrow down to find out more about a specific dish – one of the Tip tweets considers the fried turkey with a garlic butter injection, though here again some of the piT comments don’t seem to be exactly on point if they’re meant to convey a negative sentiment about fried turkey. For instance, one tweeter complains about being useless at work after the office fried turkey Thanksgiving shindig – and while useless does have a negative connotation she’s clearly talking about herself, not the dish.

As a beta service some kinks are still to be worked out. Meantime, off to find out more about what tweets added up to getting Tofurkey roasts into ninth place on the Top 10 Dishes list...