In the middle of all the buzzwords - Social Media, S-CRM, Single Customer View, Facebook Analytics and yada yada, it can be confusing on what is the difference between Google versus Sentiment Analysis. Take a simple case of the current catastrophe that has hit Japan. You can google or bing  and search for keywords like  Tsunami, Earthquake, Rithcer Scale, Japan, Nuclear Crisis, Radiation and much more. This will give you millions of search results, which you can further divide the search results into Images, Video and News.  This is search, it looks at content and parses the keywords where they appear and returns an indexed result set.

In order to understand sentiment, you now need to be more focused i.e. narrow your analysis to what people are discussing about the voicing their opinion about the subject of search. If we were to look for Tsumani and Aid, as keywords, in this case your search will return results about organizations providing aid to the victims, any fraud happening in this regard, forums and micro-websites where people are rallying to provide support, their areas of focus and much more. Analyzing this search data and providing an index on the content, the context around the content, the sentiment in the content is the key differentiation of Sentiment as opposed to pure search.

In business speak, sentiment analysis is the expression of a customer or a groups opinion about a product or service that an enterprise is providing. The key business value from understanding Sentiment and beyond include

• Customer Appreciation
  
• Customer Education
  
• Customer Connect
• Brand and Reputation Management 
• True Market Reach and Presence
  
• Better ROI from Campaigns and Cross-Sell Opportunities
• Word of Mouth Marketing

As the world goes more digital, it is essential to be more agile and closer to the customer, this means you need to understand beyond Search and implement Sentiment Analysis and much more.