Founder and CTO Nick Halstead told me that DataSift’s “key differentiator” is its focus on “getting the right answer,” rather than just overwhelming its customers with data. The Query Builder is an important part of that, allowing customers to create highly specific searches using a visual interface, with no coding required. (The company says it monitors “billions of public social conversations on Twitter, leading social networks and millions of other sources,” and that it provides access to both historical and real-time data.)