How do You go about Filtering through the Big Data?

"According to computer giant IBM, 2.5 exabytes - that's 2.5 billion gigabytes (GB) - of data was generated every day in 2012. ", says the BBC article of March 3, 2014 Big Data: Are you ready for blast-off?

And Mashable offers an approximate break down on how much data is being produced per medium channel.

Thumbnail image courtesy of iStockphoto, loops7 from the Mashable article here

YouTube offers its own statistics 

Impressive number - 100 hours of video data are uploaded to YouTube every minute. 

It is really hard to cut through a clutter of information and find exactly what you are looking for.

Curating digital data became a hot topic a few years ago with rising demands on quality information in a timely manner. Finding the rights points as important for the educational purposes as in professional environment. The problem of sorting and extracting important data points is big and concerns and reflects on different search engines and people behind them. 

Just like that in September 2008 another search engine launched called DuckDuckGo whose core idea lies in protecting searchers' privacy by not attaching "cookies" and therefore avoiding the filtered and personalized search results. DuckDuckGo swears to use the most reliable and accurate sources of information hence allowing users to extract the answers for their search inquires easier and without being influenced my there previous search quires as does Google search.

Google Search has a special order where results of search are based on a priority page rank called a "PageRank". The pages in Google Search are being ranked according to their popularity. Therefore the results of a search inquiry can be biased. However, Google offers many options for customized search based on time frame, region and many other characteristics. 

In January this year Yandex, the largest search engine in Russia was granted access to public posts made on Facebook in CIS states and Turkey (countries where Yandex officially operates). The only search engine which was granted similar access before is Microsoft’s Bing according to the Itar - Tass article "Yandex can now search for Facebook posts" of January 14, 2014. That means that Yandex and Bing have an access to more data in those regions and potentially are more accurate filters.

Still, the filtering options made available by different search engines are not enough to substantiate the search inquires the way the results reflect the exact thought process behind searching.  

I cannot agree more with entrepreneur and curator Steve Rosenbaum, who in his speech about online curation said, "We need to change the way we interact with information" and "We need more organized data and thoughtful filters." 

The demand on finding a way to demonstrate the best search query results in a timely and effective manner led to emerging of multiple data curating tools that help to do just that.

While doing a research for this post I've stumbled upon the "Content Curation Tools: The Ultimate List" article on Content Marketing Forum that provides the list of such tools available to users today. 

Image courtesy of Curata, Inc.

(from the BBC article on big data here)