Tweet powered search engine

Written by Narmad

Search engines like Google and Bing are my best friends in the World Wide Web. I don't even remember how frequently I use them on my netbook everyday. These search engines are very effective, but sometimes you may find yourself lost in millions of results. Twitter on the other hand, has become so popular among users that you'll easily find the most recent information on almost any topic. Recently, I came across an interesting search engine powered by Tweets! Let's explore Topsy.

Topsy is a new kind of search engine that works in a slightly different way. Unlike other search engines, Topsy returns search results based on conversations on sites such as Twitter, Blogs, Flickr, Digg, Yelp, Identica and others. Topsy returns search results, which are fresh and up to the minute.

When you search for a topic such as "online videos"on Topsy, it finds snippets of conversations that match your search, display results in pages, in the order of the number of "Tweets" each result has received on Twitter.

The results page gives you the option of viewing 'All Results', or results based on the last hour, day, week or month. Topsy also allows you to view results by the top authors. This is not all, you can also enter a Twitter username and Topsy will return all the results posted by that user.

Getting started

To begin Topsy search, visit the Topsy home page and you are ready to hear what peoples are talking!

Enter a desired keyword and hit the 'Search' button to see Topsy in action.

Topsy will immediately display the result page based on your keyword.

Sorting search results

As I've already mentioned, you can sort search results according to month, week, day and hour. To sort the results, click the desired sorting option from the list.

'Site' and 'from' query

Topsy also supports 'special site' and 'from' queries. Using site and from queries with your keyword is a powerful way of discovering relevant links posted on Twitter. Site query limits results to links on the domain.

For example, site:wikipedia.org will show the most popular Wikipedia articles on Twitter, while site:flickr.com will show the most popular photos posted on Flickr. You can linclude first path element with site queries. For example, site:wired.com/gadgets will show you all Wired stories about gadgets on Twitter.

'From' queries limit results to links posted by a particular user. So, from:narmad will show all links posted by me on Twitter. You can also combine both the queries together to make your search more effective. For instance, site:howtobemobile.com from:james049 will show you all the posts by me on Twitter with howtobemobile links.

I would recommend Topsy to anyone wishing up to date search results from the social networking and blogging world. Topsy is very responsive, easy to use and offers great flexibility. I hope you'll like it!

About this blogs author | Contact Us | Submit your mobile tips!