Written by The Search Giant Google has released two fascinating new features for its real-time search, one enabling users to access data from all Twitter archives, and the other, a fairly typical tool that lets you Find People to Follow.
According to a blog post, Google explains that this could be used to “explore any topic that people have discussed on Twitter (Twitter). Want to know how the news broke about health care legislation in Congress, what people were saying about Justice Paul Stevens’ retirement or what people were tweeting during your own marathon run?”
Google’s brand new feature brings back memory of the timeline search function that it released a few years back, but focusing on tweets rather than web content. At present, it allows you to find tweets as far back as February 2010. However, it’s hoping to pull in Tweets all the way back from March 2006 when Twitter was launched. You can zoom to any point in time and replay what people were saying publicly about a topic on Twitter.
Just enter a search query, then click on Show Options on the search results page. Then select Updates. At first all the latest and greatest short-form updates is shown but you can see a new chart at the top, from which the date, month and year can be selected and you can get Tweets on the given topic from that day onwards. There are a lot of fascinating uses for the functionality – tracking important events, the arc of a fast-moving celebrity story and much more.
Google Follow Finder is the another Twitter attribute added recently. It’s fairly typical twitter tool of the Find People to Follow variety. Enter your twitter name, hit submit and you get two columns of twitter users.
Google Follow Finder is a Google Labs experimental project, and a newly launched one, so some rough spots are to be expected. Hopefully Google can polish this up and make it into a really useful tool. This integration is based on Twitter’s new @Anywhere frameworks, which make it easy for any site to add Twitter functionality. The list what Google calls Tweeps are generated automatically using public following and follower lists on Twitter.
Searching Tweets from Google seems to be a lot more perfect than searching Tweets from Twitter and as a bonus, Promoted Tweets aren’t shown up in Google.
Twitter has been a hot topic around, with Twitter and TweetUp also announcing search platforms. Lets see what the future will hold on.
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