Tweeterism » Twitter Search Engines

Twitter Search Will Index and Rank Web Pages

tweeterism — Thu, 07 May 2009 16:02:48 +0000

Twitter is currently looking to crawl links included in tweets and index the content of these pages, which means that Twitter search will no longer just be a snapshot of a stream of tweets occuring in real-time.. but an archive of webpages that have been historically tweeted or mentioned by Twitter users.

This was mentioned by Santosh Jayaram, currently Twitter’s VP of Operations and formerly a the VP of search quality on Google. What’s interesting is that Twitter Search will develop a ‘reputation’ ranking system’:

When you do a search on a “trending” topic–a topic that is so big it gets its own link in the Twitter.com sidebar–Twitter will take into account the reputation of the person who wrote each tweet and rank the search results in part based on that.

Jayaram did not say precisely how reputation will be calculated; he indicated that engineers are still figuring that out. But this, again, will make Twitter Search more valuable.

Currently, if you search for a hot topic on Twitter, the results may be swamped by re-tweets and low-value content from hundreds or thousands of other users. A ranking system will help a great deal.

BackTweets: Find Out Who Links to You on Twitter

tweeterism — Wed, 06 May 2009 09:30:07 +0000

BackTweets is a Twitter search engine that allows you to do one thing: find out who links to a specific webpage or website on Twitter. All you have to do is to enter the specific URL you want to check and backtweet will show who is not just talking about it but linking to it.

Backtweets is pretty cool because it does a good job of determining who links, even when there are so many different URL shorteners out there. Note that you can also grab the RSS for your search result so you can monitor the incoming links in your feed reader.

For added goodness, you can add backtweets as a search plugin (if you are using firefox) so you can do a quick search without assessing the homepage. Here’s an example of search results for a recent post from this blog.

How to Integrate Twitter Search With Google

tweeterism — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 18:46:38 +0000

Created by Franz Enzenhofer over at the Face Saerch blog, the nifty Google Twitter integration script allows you to get the above results (notice the ‘Twitter’ tab on the nav bar).

What this means is that Twitter search is set up alongside Google: when you’re typing in a keyword using Google’s search engine, you’re automatically searching for the same thing at Twitter as well.

First things first. You need to be using the Firefox browser because this involves using greasemonkey. After you’ve got both Firefox and greasemonkey, you can click to install the script.

Twitter Job Search: A Way to Find Jobs Using Twitter

tweeterism — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 11:02:26 +0000

TwitterJobSearch is a search engine that attempts to allow job seekers to find jobs through Twitter. Created by WorkDigital, a London-based company, this allows you to do a quick keyword search and specify the location (eg. event planner in Chicago). According to their about page:

Until now, search engines for social media sites merely looked for words. We’re looking at context. We use semantic tools to look at what was said. We then look at what they’ve said before. We then look at who was saying it. If we do this right, we can figure out why they’re saying anything at all.

So does it work? I’ve tried running a search for ‘web designer in new york’ and you can see the results I’ve got below. As you can tell, some of the results point to ‘web developer’ positions so it’s not entirely 100% accurate.

I do like the idea though and it seems like a natural thing to do given the real-time speed of Twitter and how easily you can commnunicate with potential employers through it.

If the search doesn’t work for you, there’s a jobs browsing section as well which lists open opportunities according to each field. As a supplement to the topic of job search, Mashable has a great piece on finding jobs with Twitter.

Twipick: A Real-Time Search and Stream of Twitpic Images

tweeterism — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:30:26 +0000

Ever wanted to see what people are posting in real-time to Twitpic, the popular image sharing website for Twitter users? Now you can with twipick, a real-time stream of pictures posted to Twitpic.

Not only can you view the latest Twitpic images but you can also do a keyword search for just about anything, although you aren’t likely to get results for obscure terms. The search engine seems to pull results based on keywords used in comments and descriptions on twitpic, which means you might not always get what you’re looking for. But still it offers fairly good results.

Hovering over each picture shows you the description and clicking it opens up a popup which allows you to retweet the picture or visit the original page at Twitpic. And then there are icons which show the number of retweets for each picture as well, along with a trending topic search on the left sidebar.

All in all its a fun tool to view and if you’re bored, this will give you a good source of entertainment. The only problem I had with it was that it was sometimes rather laggy and when you click another application on your desktop, the twitpic stream freezes up and you have to refresh the page. This can be jarring when you’re multi-tasking.

Aside from that, it’s a great real-time streaming search engine. Created by Janos Pal Toth.