One of Twitter‘s coolest uses is as a real-time search engine. News tends to break and spread faster on Twitter than anywhere else, and generally speaking, people know things there before anyone else picks them up. All the stories should be taken with some healthy skepticism, but Twitter’s proving itself to be the place for real, up-to-the-second coverage.
One of my favorite stories regarding this topic just happened a few days ago. Shaquille O’Neal, a popular basketball player and a popular Twitterer, found out via Twitter that he was being traded. Funny stuff. But the point is, if you want to know what’s happening, immediately, Twitter’s where you want to be.
Unfortunately, Twitter’s search engine leaves a lot to be desired. The native search frequently brings up incomplete results, both in a current search and going back. Plus Twitter search seems to frequently be down, and always be shoddy.
The best alternative, and a great way to track and search Twitter, is Scoopler. Scoopler is a fast, real-time or in other words live search engine for Twitter ““ that’s also got some cool features of its own. It does its main job well, and adds just enough features to make it miles ahead of Twitter’s own search.
For the sake of full explanations, Scoopler also searches results from Flickr, Digg, Delicious, and a few other sites ““ given the relative slowness with which these sites are updated, Twitter tends to both dominate search results and be the most functional use of Scoopler’s search.
Scoopler’s search is truly real-time. When you search for a word or phrase (pick your own, or use one of the popular ones Scoopler suggests), you’re taken immediately to a waterfall-looking column of tweets, that updates as new ones come in. Frequently, it’s too fast to read, especially if you’re tracking a popular subject; you can easily pause the updates if you need to catch up.
In addition, Scoopler does an excellent job with multimedia stuff ““ videos, images, links, and the like. Within the stream of tweets on your topic, Scoopler extracts all the videos, image, and links to a convenient sidebar, where it organizes them by type, and by the number of shares. If a video is being passed around, you can see it without digging through the stream to figure out what it is you’re looking for. You can easily share anything on Scoopler, too, just by clicking “Peek.”
One thing I like to do periodically is click the “view all” button on the home screen ““ this tracks all of the most popular topics at once. First of all, the speed at which they update is crazy. Second of all, it’s a lot like skimming news headlines, and is a great way to get caught up on what’s happening.
One day, I predict, Twitter will fix its search ““ it’ll probably look a lot like Scoopler, actually. But for now, Scoopler seems to be one of the best of a small number of Web apps that let you search and track what’s happening on Twitter and in the world, pretty much at the speed of light.
As Twitter becomes even more of a source for breaking news, editorial opinion, and the like, keeping tabs on what’s hot on Twitter will become even more important and useful. Scoopler’s an excellent and simple way to do exactly that.
How do you search Twitter? Is there even a need to? Go ahead and discuss in the comments.
Tagged: Twitter • twitter search • web trends
