Top 4 Twitter Search Engines: Will Topsy be the Top of the Twitter SE’s?
Topsy.com, launched last week, is a brand new search engine focused exclusively on Twitter content. Like Google, it presents its results based on popularity metrics, namely the popularity or influence of the tweeter in question — a factor determined by how many followers the user has and how many time his or her messages have been re-tweeted.
Based in San Francisco, the company says it plans to branch out from Twitter if it sees initial success, arguing that traditional search engines have not adapted quickly enough to the changing tides of conversation on the web. Essentially, searching Twitter is more likely to produce results that are hot at the time because exchanges are taking place in real time. Google and its ilk lag behind this group. For example, if you were searching for the best computer to buy, Google would serve up links to sites that have built the best reputation over time by getting a lot of hits and linking to other high-traffic sites. Topsy would deliver links to the computers that the most people are tweeting about right now.
Looking at today’s top Twitter Search Engines here’s my top 4:
Search.Twitter.com - Keeping up with interesting news and people you care about is one dimension of Twitter, but what if you need to find out what’s happening in the world beyond your personal timeline?
There is an undeniable need to search, filter, and otherwise interact with the volumes of news and information being transmitted to Twitter every second. Twitter Search helps you filter all the real-time information coursing through our service.
Topsy.com - Topsy is a new kind of search engine, with a new way of looking at the Internet. Topsy doesn’t think the Internet is a collection of documents. Or even a web of documents. Topsy sees the Internet as a stream of conversations. Topsy treats people differently from the webpages they create and the things they say. And Topsy sees that people in every community are connected in a web of relationships, where each person influences other people to read, talk and think about things.
Topsy listens to the conversations taking place all the time on the living, social web. This is the rapidly growing, exciting world of Twitter, Blogs, Flickr, Digg, Yelp, Identica and many other communities. People use these communities to share reviews, opinions, messages, comments and discussions about things. Topsy indexes those things. Topsy indexes what people are talking about.
Twellow.com - Twellow is currently grabbing publicly available messages from the Twitter.com micro-blogging service. They then analyze and categorize each of the users responsible for those messages into the various categories found at Twellow.com. By adding these people to specific categories Twellow helps you narrow your searching into specific niches where you can find who you are looking for. In addition to Twitter, Twellow is actively working on adding more social media services to broaden your capacity to find people who matter.
TwitterTroll.com - TwitterTroll indexes tweets from the public timeline. We index a large majority of tweets, but can not guarantee all tweets will be indexed. Finding new Twitter friends can be quite a challenge. With so many different people out there where do you start finding like minded people? The guys behind TwitterTroll had a vision to create a search engine strictly for indexing and searching Twitter posts. Thats how TwitterTroll.com was born. They’re are not trying to compete with the big boys, but simply provide real-time search for Twitter posts. TwitterTroll.com is simply a resource to help you find new Twitter friends!
