Twitter’s search engine has always pretty much sucked. The functionality was put on the site in August 2007, but it only searches username, location, bio and URL — not the actual tweets in the stream.
Lots of folks out there have used the Twitter API to build their own search engine, the most popular of which was Terraminds until it shut down. People were dismayed. Then Summize came on the scene (in early April, I think), and it’s all anyone could talk about. They allow you to filter results by language, have a “reply” link beside every tweet for easy access, and allow you to specifically search for tweets to or from a particular username. Also really nice is the in-page update when a new matching tweet is posted.
Real-time search means that when Twitter Track is down (as it has been for many weeks, maybe months at this point), you don’t have to miss replies and can stay on top of what’s important to you.
So was what the natural thing for Twitter to do? Buy Summize.
The transition happened today. Summize.com is no longer. What it used to look like:
Now automatically redirects to search.twitter.com
Everything works the same, so no need to worry. Twitter promises to more tightly integrate the functionality in the future. Looking forward to see what they come up with.
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