There are a plethora of startups that are trying to harness and improve upon Twitter’s real-time search functionality, including Collecta, One Riot, Scoopler and TwitterTroll. The simple fact is that there is considerable value for users in searching Tweets, and even the big guns like Microsoft and Google are beginning to wake up to this. Today, Searchtastic, which bills itself as “smart Twitter search,” is launching its own Twitter search engine.
Like other Twitter search sites, Searchtastic lets you search Tweets for a particular keyword or hashtag. What makes the search engine interesting is the ability to pull up Tweets from weeks or months ago, which Twitter’s own search engine doesn’t allow you to do. Twitter’s search currently lets you see Tweets from a week and a half back (which varies).
The other main feature of Searchtastic is the ability to search Tweets from a particular user. And the interface lets you add and delete search terms fairly easily. And speaking of the interface, Searchtastic definitely leaves little to be desired. But the startup says that it will be adding new features and improvements in the next few weeks, so hopefully that will include a redesign.
great ! finally able to search the archives, can’t believe it took this long.
just tried it out. only getting few search results, seems not to be working.
Hmm… it is working well for me. This seems useful.
“Searchtastic definitely leaves little to be desired” I think you meant “leaves a little to be desired”. Otherwise it contradicts the next sentence.
Google’s new twitter search engine.
Check http://www.tootle.com
Searching *just* twitter is ok, but something like Collecta etc that searches a variety of sources makes more sense to me.
I like Collecta but Searchtastics hashtag and old tweet search is pretty handy.
Who will become the Google of Twitter searches?
Personally, I prefer tweetzi as it is very simple and quick to use. The service also seems to be taking off in the far east with a considerable following in China.
http://tweetzi.com
Allow me to clarify one point. Searchtastic should provide better results than Twitter when you specify a Username for the search. It will search both your current tweets and your history.
If you don’t provide a Username, you may receive fewer results than Twitter. We cannot index all of Twitter (although we are expanding our coverage daily). There are also limits to how much we are allowed to pull from Twitter’s API.
Here’s a compare and contrast of Collecta and Cuil who mix ‘em up nicely. Much more varied results.
http://www.coll...20nobel%20prize and http://www.cuil...h?q=obama+nobel
I really wonder how these guys index the tweet whether it is from API or something else?
what, exactly, is the value of searching tweets? i understand once in a while you want to see what people are saying about a company at TC50, for example, but i’ve used twitter search like 3 times in the past 2 years. what is everyone searching for?
Hey I tested it .. somewhat really good .since it allows tweets in different languages to be searched also
http://www.sear...©à¯ˆ&Page=2
But the problem is I searched for this tweet (மனை) by me using http://bit.ly/1e2gGW
The results are only displayed on second page
The search url is not visible there…
so posting it again
(searchtastic.com/index.php?User=TwitLan&Search=மனை&Page=2)
We display all languages correctly but unfortunately search doesn’t work on languages with different character sets yet. Sorry, we will try to fix this when we can.
Still closer to the ideal search engine. Much appreciated
This needs to happen. I can’t wait. How about being able to search through Facebook updates?
Still a long way in terms of organizing data and making it useful
hmm.. nice info.. I want to try thar.. thanks a lot
good new search.
http://peopleve...age-owes-6.html
Searchtastic is the winner.
My Twitter account is sandboxed because I have offended by the children who run Twitter by griping about all the FAIL Whales two months ago. I don’t show up as originating tweets in official Twitter Search or in Twitter’s Find People.
Yet Searchtastic displayed tweets ORIGINATING from me.
That is win.
Searchtastic constitutes a major step forward by remedying a major deficiency–searching past tweets of beyond those of the most recent vintage.
I’m still wondering how Twitter plan to make their business model profitable in the long term.
Moreover, if a “bigger” player, such as Google does buy Twitter, will search services such as SearchTastic et al form part of the bought technology?
Time will tell I guess
had the same problem .. but its now working fine …
Best,
Daina
Or just set up your searches and have tweetalarm notify you when someone tweets about your keywords of interest
I love twitter for the real time search aspect but I built this tool on a rainy saturday because I found I spent far too much time checking to see if someone tweeted about stuff I care about.
Not impressed at all. Very limited results. For Twitter archival search, check out Samepoint.com. Shows much more data.