A Basic Twitter Search Engine

Using Google Co-op I created a simple search engine that scours Twitter. Feel free to improve on it. For simplicity sake, this bare bones tool excludes all RSS pages from within the site. It's also unfortunately not time based. I wish Google would let us create custom search engines using their blog search and other tools. Who's up for making a mobile version of this baby? If it's used, I will also publish a Twitter zeitgest.

Comments

[James Zhou]

Hi, Steve,
I just tried out your Twitter search engine, it's pretty good. I' ve heard of Google Co-op, but I never used it create my customized search engine. Probably, I can give it a try later.

[Frank Roche]

Steve, very cool tool...and guess where I saw it? On your Twitter entry. Symmetry! Thanks for this.

[jonas nockert]

This is great, now I really have to look into google co-op! :)

However, I was a little confused at first with the number of hits I got before realizing that it was the inclusion of the "with_friends" pages that threw me off. Basically, even if the search term has only been twitter'd once, you might find the search results multiplied by how many friends that person has who still has the search term listed on their friends page.

[Jenguin]

Hmm.. it didn't seem to work for me, at least with my first search. The other day I twittered that I was standing in a line to see the indie flick "Monster Camp". I searched for monster camp and "monster camp" - and it didn't pop up. I don't have a private status on Twitter so I'm not sure why it didn't find it.

[doug_r]

had the same experience as Jenguin above; searched both on my nic (doug_r) and some key terms and neither appeared in any result.

[Steve Rubel]

It's not perfect at all. Anyone want to play with it? Email me and I will add you as a contributor.

[Ming]

There are couple of things to remember.

1) this is still based on Google Search so it still needs to be indexed by Google (blog search seems to be more up-to-date than web search)

2) the co-op is a simplified tool for the masses

Check this quick Twitter search based on the Google AJAX Search API. This page does a "blog" search on twitter.com and returns the results by date. If you click on the "cog" icon, you can un-check "sort by date" to obtain the search results by relevance.

A test search for "steve" returned "Steve Rubel: Check out this photo of Steve Jobs watching his kid's ..." from 3 hours ago.

To expand the results, click on the "page" icons.

Have fun... This search was a quick 15 min exercise so I'm sure it can be tweaked and improved upon.

http://stickiwidgets.com/widgets/sw_search_widget/twitter.html

[bala@tapgoogle.com]

If anybody interested in developing Google Co-op Search engine for any themes, or Google Gadgets & Widgets, please email to me at bala@tapgoogle.com

I can do it for FREE. All i will need is a link from your website ..

thanks
~BALA

[vaspers the grate]

I used it to find the Steve Jobs twitter page. I guess I could just add / then name to find future twitter pages of people I want to follow>...?

[Brad]

Great idea! I actually just started creating a real-time twitter search engine. You can view it here: http://www.TwitterTroll.com

[Dave Sterry]

I tried out the search as well but Google's co-op seems to lack a quick repetitive crawling option. They kinda have to so their tool doesn't act as a DOS attack. In any case, building your own search engine isn't that hard as long as you don't want to capture everything you possibly can(that would be tricky). With cron, curl, mysql, php, and a little perl you can do: http://www.davidsterry.com/tsearch

Again, it doesn't get everything but it's enough to find some interesting folks to follow.

[David Sterry]

I have to revise my previous comment. I'm now capturing nearly every public tweet possible. I've also setup email alerts so you can have your favorite keyword mentions emailed to you on a daily/weekly basis. Just click my name below to check it out.