It’s time for another in our occasional series of search tool roundups, but this one is more focused than previous articles: Rather than look at a variety of random search tools, I’ll introduce you to a handful of Twitter search tools that may have flown under your radar until now. You’ll learn how to search the bios of other Twitter users, how to search deeper into Twitter’s archives, and how to find jobs advertised on Twitter. But first, an interesting Twitter search tool with potentially serious local search implications.

Schmap: Trending Restaurants & Bars

The Schmap Picks: Trending Restaurants & Bars search tool lets you see the collected tweets about restaurants and bars in 13 cities around the world. For any of the 13 cities, you can browse by category (pizza/burgers, seafood/sushi, etc.) and even by district/neighborhood. Here’s a screenshot showing trending eateries in the downtown Seattle area:

For each establishment, you can click to see all of the tweets (”opinions”) in the Schmap system, which effectively creates a Twitter landing page for local restaurants and bars. Here’s the opinion page for one restaurant:

It makes for an interesting slice of opinion about local restaurants, complete with address and location plotted on a map — sort of a Twitter-based version of Yelp or Citysearch, though I’m assuming not as comprehensive as those well-established local directories. The pages are crawlable and have very SEO-friendly URLS, so it’s not hard to imagine these pages eventually ranking for some restaurants.

Areaface

Areaface is one of several tools that lets you search for Twitter users in a specific city or town. When you visit the site, just click anywhere on the map and Areaface will load recent tweets from that location. But there’s a twist: If you want, you can further narrow the results by keyword. This screenshot shows people in the Dallas area tweeting about U2 (the band plays a concert there tonight).

You can see each person’s tweet by putting your mouse over their avatar. The results are fairly up-to-date, too: The most recent tweet captured in the search above was published within an hour of my search.

TwitterJobSearch.com

A site that does exactly what its name implies: let’s you search jobs that have been advertised via Twitter. TwitterJobSearch.com says it gets around the 140-character limitation by using natural language tools to process tweets, then crawls pages that have been linked and associates the job listing data it finds back to the original tweet.

Search results can be sorted by date or relevance, and there are several filters including the date of the job posting, the job title, job type, salary, location, and more. A cool beta feature plots the job-related tweets on a map.

Searchtastic

Searchtastic is a new Twitter search engine that, unlike Twitter’s own search, can search quite a ways back into “historical” tweets — further into the archives, in other words. Searchtastic is limited by the Twitter API, though, and readily admits that it can’t index all tweets. Although it’s not necessary, the site suggests that you’ll get better search results when you specify a username. Here’s a screenshot showing tweets indexed (and returned) from as far back as mid-July:

A unique feature is that any word on the search results can be clicked to add it to your search query.

TweepSearch

If you’re looking to connect with like-minded Twitter users, doing a basic keyword search on recent tweets may not produce the kind of results you want. Search for “seahawks,” for example, and you’re going to find people in Jacksonville tweeting about the way their team was demolished Sunday by the Seattle Seahawks. TweepSearch skips the content of tweets and instead searches the bios of Twitter users. So, a search for “seahawks” produces much better results:

You can sort the results by screen name, or by the number of followers/friends each user has.

See also:

• Five More Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should
• Another 5 Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should
• 5 (More) Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should
• 7 Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should

Desperate times call for job search engines. That’s how comScore explains today’s news that job search was the fastest growing search category in the U.S. in 2008.

Visits to job search engines grew by more than 51% in 2008 to 18.8 million visitors, comScore says. And as the economy grew worse during the course of the year, job search engines saw more traffic:

“The final months of the year, which typically experience seasonal softness in job searching behavior due to the holidays, were instead some of the most heavily trafficked months of 2008.”

CareerBuilder.com was the leader in the space with 9.1 million visitors, a 78% increase over 2007. Yahoo’s HotJobs was up 146% over 2007, finishing second with 5.6 million visitors. Monster.com was the only site in the Top 10 to see fewer visitors in 2008 than the previous year.

comScore also notes that females, households with no children, and households making at least $75,000 all spent more time on job search engines in 2008 than in 2007.

Microsoft buys stake in CareerBuilder from News.com reports that Microsoft has purchased a minority equity stake in CareerBuilder.com, a job search site. In addition, CareerBuilder and MSN Careers have continued their partnership deal where CareerBuilder will be the exclusive job search engine for MSN Careers.

Earlier this week, Google In Talks To Acquire SimplyHired from TechCrunch reported that Google was in talks with SimplyHired, another job search engine. Dion Lim, the president of SimplyHired told Techcrunch that there is “lots of interest in us,” when asked about the Google acquisition rumors.