San Francisco — Ever since the advent of real-time search lately, search engine behemoth Google has released two fascinating new features for its real-time search, one that enables users to access whatever data is needed from all the Twitter archives, and the other is a is fairly typical tool that lets you “find people to follow” variety.
The announcement of the new Twitter services, probably coincided with Twitter’s Chirp conference which ended yesterday.
The new feature brings back memory of the timeline search function that Google released a few years back, but focusing on tweets rather than web content. Although, it is rather a short history, which allows you to find tweets as far back as February 2010. However, in the future though, they might be able to pull in Tweets all the way back from March 2006 when Twitter was launched.
With the introduction of blogs, tweets and online communications, there is a constant online conversation about breaking news, people and places, from celebrities to local, adding up to the search content making it difficult for users to access information of some time ago.
“Tweets and other short-form updates create a history of statement that can provide valuable insights into what has happened and how people have reacted. We want to give you a way to search across this information and make it useful,” Dylan Casey, Google’s Product Manager for Real-Time Search, wrote. “Starting today, you can zoom to any point in time and “replay” what people were saying publicly about a topic on Twitter.”
For example you are a Boston Red Sox fan, and you want to see what people were saying about pitcher Josh Beckett in 2009, when Beckett was having some trouble on the mound. After entering a search query, ‘red sox‘ users should first click on “Show Options” on the search results page. They must then select “Updates”. They will first be shown the latest and greatest short-form updates but they will also see a new chart at the top, from which they can select the date, month and year, and they will see all the Tweets on the given topic from that day onwards.
By selecting a particular date, you can even discover the exact moment when the fickle Boston fans got behind their starting ace again. Obviously, there are a lot of fascinating uses for the functionality – tracking the arc of a fast-moving celebrity story, for instance, or pin-pointing the moment when Twitter buzz becomes a full-bodied Twitter flood.
Google says the archives search will be rolled out slowly over the next few days.
The second Twitter attribute Google added is called Google Follow Finder. This is 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.
Twitter search engines these have been a hot topic this week, with Twitter and TweetUp also announcing search platforms. Besides, searching Twitter from Google already seems a lot “more perfect” than searching Twitter from Twitter and as a bonus, “Promoted Tweets” do not show up in Google.