Google Search Across Twitter Archives

Replay Twitter history for any subject.  New feature allows you to search for topics at any point in time across Twitter’s public archive.

Starting today, you can zoom to any point in time and “replay” what people were saying publicly about a topic on Twitter. To try it out, click “Show options” on the upper left corner of the search results page, then select “Updates.” The first page will show you the familiar latest and greatest short-form updates from a comprehensive set of sources, but now there’s a new chart at the top. In that chart, you can select the year, month or day, or click any point to view the tweets from that specific time period. Here we’ve searched for [golden gate park] and browsed to see March, 2010:

Of course, Twitter has its own search engine, which was made even more powerful with its acquisition of the Summize search tool. But while Twitter’s built-in search is great for current topics, it’s sort of clunky for dealing with tweets from the past — particularly since you need to rely heavily on Twitter’s advanced search page.

Google’s alternative Twitter archive search is more visual, and has the ability to help you find what you’re looking for without dealing with advanced search options. To use it, simply click the “Show Options” link on any search results page, and then choose “Updates.” You’ll be presented with the most recent updates around your search term, but you can also go back in time using the chart at the top of the page.

The feature will let you see what the Twitter-verse thought of a particular topic at any given time, and will also be useful for tracking your own past Twitter conversations — something which is far more difficult than it should be for a service that prides itself on conversation..

Google’s Twitter archive search is being rolled out in English globally over the next few days, and will initially support tweets going back to February 11, 2010. Eventually it will support the entire Twitter archive, back to the very first tweet on March 21, 2006. If you’d like to try out the feature now, check out this link.

Posted via email from Nick Nicholls Thoughts…