Google Offers New Option for Searching Twitter

Continuing in its work with social-networking-powered Internet searches, Google announced a new feature that allows for “replaying” of Twitter content. Rather than focusing solely on the latest news, the way search engines and news sources tend to do, the feature allows users the ability to zoom in on past dates and see what people were tweeting about on a given topic at a specific time in the past. The new feature is available under “Show Options”/”Updates” on the search results page. Once selected, you can enter in the day, month or year and take a tour of the topic led by the ghost of Twitter past.

Google gives some examples of the utility of the new replay feature: “By replaying tweets, you can explore any topic that people have discussed on Twitter. Want to know how the news broke about health care legislation in Congress, what people were saying about Justice Paul Stevens’ retirement or what people were tweeting during your own marathon run? These are the kinds of things you can explore with the new updates mode.”

As I writer, I’m pretty excited for this type of feature. Regular searches are dominated by the latest news on any topic, and it can be time-consuming to sort through and find the older information you’re looking for.

Just yesterday, I was trying to find the name of the youngest American to have summited Mount Everest (Johnny Collinson) . I remembered it happened last year, but couldn’t recall his name. The search results were so dominated by news of 13-year-old Jordan Romero, who is preparing to make an attempt at becoming the youngest, that it took well longer than it should have to find Collinson’s name, even after I switched up the search terms a couple of times. With a replay feature, I could have narrowed it down more quickly and reduced the clutter.[via Google Blog]