Opinmind grabs positive and negative blogger opinions

Have you seen this? Opinmind is a specialized search engine that combs blogs for opinions about a search term and displays links to the opinions in a split screen, positive on the left, negative on the right.

For instance try putting in George Bush
http://www.opinmind.com/search.jsp?q=George+Bush

It comes out 41% positive, which I think is just about exactly his approval rating right now as reported by the official opinion polls.

- Chicago comes out 86% positive.
- Tivo is 91% in the plus column
- Colin Firth, also 91% positive, no surprise there
- Dell is almost 50-50

But it will not give you accurate results on something like "broadband" which got 35% positive, 65% negative. People don't hate broadband; they just get pissed off at their provider. That makes me wonder if the results tend to skew negative because people tend to emote more about things they don't like? Well, maybe not. Teenage female bloggers and I will gush a lot. Maybe we correct the other tendency.

I'm trying to figure out how it works. It seems to look for words like: like, love, hate, followed by a the noun you searched on. But it's more sophisticated than just that. Here's the About page. No enlightenment. I wonder if they weight hate heavier than like.