As more and more of us come to rely on social media, not only for marketing campaigns but as a means to get breaking news, engage with peers, and so on, the need for search engines which target blog posts, Tweets, Diggs, social bookmarks, etc has increased.

So, we set out to find the best social media and real-time search engines that exist. Turn your eyes away from Google for a coupe of hours and explore the numerous discussions and conversations on topics of interest to you!

LeapFish – this is a neat little engine. Blogs, Youtube, Facebook, tweets, diggs, autosuggestion tool for searches, and much more. Definitely worth trying.

SocialMention – has an interesting ranking system, plus regular users, sources, social media alerts, trending topics, and a blog widget.

Whostalking – search by specific category from news, blogs, forums, images, videos, networks and tweets.

Samepoint – offers wide ranging searches across wikis, news, blogs, tweets, bookmarks, networks, podcasts, videos, news and so on.

OneRiot – uses social network information in the results you receive. One Riot basically examines what is being shared and is trending at the moment, so it can bring you the most popular items.

AardVark – you submit your question and the search engine locates the best person to answer for you across your social network of friends and friends of friends.

Fluther – is similar to aardvark, although it also displays all questions recently asked, and you can discuss your questions and answers in real time with other users and experts.

That’s a few to start with. Please let us know more – these will certainly provide fascinating insights into what people are looking for from the social media they adopt.