Whether its reporters gauging consumer reaction to Netflix’s next move or a business trying to measure the popularity of a new product, social media search tools are key.
One company, Topsy.com, is hoping to be the go-to place for social media search by providing real-time search, a term describing the process of finding information as it is posted, ideal for searching social networks which experience constant updates from their users.
Topsy made news last Summer after Google shut down its own Realtime search function, used to search tweets and Facebook postings, after the company said that its contract with Twitter expired. Topsy and Microsoft’s Bing were identified as two places where users could search Twitter’s “firehose” of tweets.
Topsy maintains a three-year index of Tweets and uses an “influence algorithm” to rank results according to their influence, that is, how often a tweet has been re-tweeted or cited within Twitter.
Today Topsy added Google+ search, allowing users the opportunity to search the newest social network. Search returns are also influence-based, taken into account the popularity of the Google+ user providing the content.
Google introduced search to its social network last month, when Google+ went from invite-only to an open beta available to anyone. But Google’s Realtime search service remains shuttered. Last July Google told the blog SearchEngineLand that it had plans to re-launch the service sometime with the future with “realtime data from a variety of sources.”
AllThingsD notes that while Topsy’s Twitter search is the result of an agreement it has with Twitter, “Google isn’t handing out much access to Google+ to developers yet.” As a result, Topsy’s Google+ search is limited to public posts.
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