Twitter search engines

I just noticed an announcement of Twittertroll, another Twitter search engine. As I have seen similar announcements, I found it worthwhile to have a closer look at several sites offering specific search functions for the Twitosphere.


Name : Twittersearch
URL : twittermap.com/search
Author : twitter.com/davetroy
Announcement : here
Launched : March 15, 2007
Description : Twitter zeitgeist will be searched and displayed.
Number of messages indexed : only a moving window of a limited number of days
Results of query "paris hilton" : 210 messages



Name : Twitterment, What are we twittering?
URL : twitterment.umbc.edu
Author : ebiquity.umbc.edu
Announcement : here
Launched : April 11, 2007
Description : Twitterment provides a search interface over an index of recent updates obtained periodically from the public timeline API.
Number of messages indexed : over 1,7 million posts, since April 2007
Results of query "paris hilton" : 407 messages



Name : Twitter.FM, Search what world's people are doing!
URL : twitter.fm
Author : twitter.com/ohkura
Announcement : here
Launched : April 29, 2007
Description : Simple but multilingual full text search engine for Twitter, supports CJK, Arabic, etc. Country specified search is also provided.
Number of messages indexed : ?
Results of query "paris hilton" : 20 messages



Name : TwitterTroll.com, the only real-time Twitter search engine!
URL : twittertroll.com
Author : twitter.com/williamsba
Announcement : here
Launched : June 4, 2007
Description : TwitterTroll.com indexes tweets from the public timeline. We index a large majority of tweets, but can not guarantee all tweets will be indexed.
Number of messages indexed : already over 75,000, since June 4, 2007
Results of query "paris hilton" : 83 messages


I discovered that several sites mentioned in an previous post on this blog (Monitoring the buzz in the Twitosphere) have stopped working. I have added information below for two sites that used to offer search. Perhaps they will back in a short while.


Name : Twitterverse, What is Twitter Doing Today
URL : www.twitterverse.com
Author : twitter.com/tw1tterverse
Announcement : here
Launched : April 9, 2007
Description : Twitterverse displays popular words based on time and popularity.
Number of messages indexed : down since May 11, 2007
Results of query "paris hilton" : no results



Name : Twitterbuzz, what are people linking to from Twitter
URL : twitterbuzz.com
Author : twitter.com/rsynnott
Announcement : here
Launched : March 19, 2007
Description : TwitterBuzz collects links that are mentioned on Twitter and arranges them in order of popularity. You can view links mentioned in the last hour, day, week, or forever (since archival started).
Number of messages indexed : no results shown
Results of query "paris hilton" : no results


The table below shows the traffic rankings for Twitter.com and the Twitter search engines mentioned above. Web traffic to the Twitter search engines seems to be limited.


If you cannot find the Twitter messages what you are looking for using one or more of the above mentioned Twitter search engines, you can always use one of the major search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, Live.com, ... as they have also indexed Twitter.com :
Google.com : 693,000 pages
Yahoo.com : 229,000 pages
Live.com : 140,000 pages

Monitoring the buzz in the Twitosphere

With the increasing popularity of Twitter, people want to know what's hot within the Twitosphere. Several initiatives have popped up.

TwitterBuzz
Twitterbuzz shows you what people using Twitter are linking to. TwitterBuzz offers users different timeframes : an hourly view, a weekly view, a view from the start.


TwitterVerse
What is Twitter Doing Today : a tagcloud featuring the most used words in messages from Twitter. Different possibilities are available : words used today, the last hour, the last 5 or 10 hours or yesterday.


TwitterZone
Twitterzone offers 4 possibilities to get a view what's hot in the Twitosphere : most twittered words, most twittered links, most active twitters, most active services. The timeframe can be one hour, 24 hours, 7 days or 1 month.


TwitterSearch
TwitterSearch allows you to look up the twitter messages containing a keyword of your choice. TwitterSearch has limited memory, only going back a few hours.


What are people twittering about ?
A very simple interface shows a list of the 20 most common nouns or noun-phrases seen in different timeframes : last hour, 3 hours, 6 hours, 12 hours, 1 day, 2 days and 1 week.


Twitterholic
Twitterholic provides insight to the top 100 twitters according to the number of updates, number of friends and number of followers. Twitterholic does not reveal the actual buzz, but rather the users who are likely to create the buzz.


As English is currently the most frequently used language by twitters, most services only provide information for English. Persons looking for twitters using other languages will have to wait a little bit before other, more localised services will pop up.