Topsy: Finding Tweets with More Power

Topsy may be unfamiliar or unheard of to many, but it isn't new. The search engine powered by the retrieval of Twitter "tweets" has been growing in popularity as quick as the social communication service itself. Over time, functionality has incrementally superseded Twitter's own official search engine, and now with newly implemented enhancements, things just got even better.

The service that says "conversations are about people" and that tweets are the "currency of the web," has grown-up and matured tremendously, becoming a web favorite on the social scene. Just prior to the 2009 holiday season, users were treated to the service's last set of updated features including Topsy Toplinks, a Wordpress plug-in, and support for native retweets. Topsy's latest round of improved functionality was officially announced on the Topsy blog on February 10th, 2010, and the company is appropriately calling them the "five awesome new features."

If you were sum up how the search engine behaves, the key term would be influence, and the five new features: Photo Search, Tweet Search, Timeline Search, Topsy Trends, and RSS feeds, all follow that basic decree. At its simplest, the core mission of Topsy is to take criteria, and return the most influential results to the user. Photo Search, Tweet Search, Timeline Search expand upon that premise.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. If you are looking for a photo or photos based on a particular subject, regardless of the tweet, this is now possible. Topsy will provide results based on popularity from Twitter photo sharing favorites Twitpic, Flickr, Imgur, Img.ly, and Yfrog. Photo search results can often be quite interesting, and Topsy welcomes sharing anything cool by tweeting @Topsy.

Many tweets contain a URL, such as those containing a reference to a breaking news story. Other tweets that are simply commentary many not have a link in them at all. Previously, search results were based only on those tweets that contained a URL within. With updates to the system, search results that are ranked by influence will now include tweets that either do or do not include URLs. As can be imagined, this will provide more accurate results that will contain many tweets that were not included before. By popular demand, Topsy has also added a timeline search result ordering feature as well. Simply meaning, that when you receive the result of a tweet search, you have the option of the default listing by influence rank, or you can choose to see the results in order of oldest to newest.

Topsy Trends is a great new option that gives a quick glimpse of the top trending topics on Twitter. Result collections are categorized on the top 100, 1000, and 5000 links, tweets, or photos.

Another popular request from many users; now, rather than searching and researching the same topic over and over, or saving a search as a favorite to revisit later, the ability to subscribe to a search result through a standard RSS feed is now possible. This essential feature is certain to welcome a few subscriptions in many Google Readers.

Sources:

Topsy blog