The Twitter Blog has a short blog post mentioning that they have added technology “to show higher quality results for trend queries by returning tweets that are more useful.” Clearly, this is Twitter’s first step in improving Twitter Search by adding relevancy and search quality factors to the search algorithm.

Currently, Twitter Search returns results based on keyword match and the most recent tweet. Trending Topics is the first of Twitter’s search areas to get the relevancy filter, to reduce the “noise” that Twitter Search has. We knew Twitter was working on adding relevancy factors with linkage data, and I assume this is the first signs of it. In the Twitter blog post, Twitter said it might be very noticeable right now, but they hope to improve it over time.

You can test it out for yourself at Twitter Search and clicking on one of the “trending topics.”

In other Twitter news, Twitter is experimenting with adding retweet buttons to some user accounts. There seems to be a lot more buzz around the “retweet” button then around the Twitter Search relevancy addition.

A month ago, Twitter said they would be rolling out Twitter lists. That day has finally come and almost all users can create their own lists. Lists are basically a way for Twitter users to create groups of Twitter users into categories. For example, you can find the Search Engine Land team all in one Twitter stream at twitter.com/sengineland/team.

How does one create a Twitter List? The first thing you need to know is that the owner of the Twitter account can make a Twitter list in the format of twitter.com/username/listname. Only the Twitter username can define who goes into the list under their own account.

You login into Twitter and at the top, you should see this:

Click on create new list and you will see:

To add people to a list, find a profile and click on the “Lists” drop down. Then select the list you want to add that Twitter user to.

As you add people, they can then find what lists they are on by clicking on the “listed” link on their profile section. The listed link goes to http://twitter.com/USERNAME/lists/memberships. For example, you can see the lists I am on at http://twitter.com/rustybrick/lists/memberships.

There are many desktop and web based applications and software that created these types of lists for you. Now, Twitter allows you to do it directly on Twitter.com.

Already widely reported from yesterday the Pew Internet & American Life almost 20 percent of US Internet users are on Twitter or updating their status with another social network: LinkedIn, MySpace or Facebook. According to the report:

Some 19% of internet users now say they use Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves, or to see updates about others. This represents a significant increase over previous surveys in December 2008 and April 2009, when 11% of internet users said they use a status-update service.

Three groups of internet users are mainly responsible for driving the growth of this activity: social network website users, those who connect to the internet via mobile devices, and younger internet users – those under age 44.

Here’s Pew’s demographic breakdown:

According to the report, parsing by network:

The median age of a Twitter user is 31, which has remained stable over the past year. The median age for MySpace is now 26, down from 27 in May 2008, and the median age for LinkedIn is now 39, down from 40. Facebook, however, is graying a bit: the median age for this social network site is now 33, up from 26 in May 2008.

The Pew report paints a slightly different and younger picture of Twitter users than earlier studies:

Source: comScore, February, 2009 (via MarketingCharts)

Here’s the breakdown of social networking more generally compared with Twitter usage:

The report also found that mobile users and those who have more devices are more likely to use Twitter or a comparable service for status updates.

These data illustrate the growing importance of integrating social media into search marketing strategies.

Google’s Marissa Mayer has announced at the Web 2.0 Summit that Google Social Search will be launching in the coming weeks. I’ve seen an early release of it. It’s way cool. Below, what details we have now about this plus some follow up on today’s Google-Twitter search deal that was announced.

NOTE: Google Social Search is now live. See our Google Social Search Launches, Gives Results From Your Trusted “Social Circle” post.

I’m in a bind because I can’t say more about the product than what Mayer released today. I wasn’t able to make it to Web 2.0 nor were her remarks on the product broadcast live. TechCrunch was there and summarizes what she said this way:

There’s a new Google product called Social Search that is launching in Google Labs. This is a new feature that allows you to see results for queries from people in your social network. This works by using your Google Profile. If you fill it out with the other social networks you’re a member of, such as FriendFeed, Google will scan who you are connected to and give your results from those people.

For example, I have a Google Profile here. On that page, I’ve listed my Twitter account. This means when I’m signed into Google, it can tell who I am and what my Twitter account is with certainty. Then when I search, it can offer to show me web pages that are related to other people in my Twitter profile.

More specifically, if I were do to a search relating to journalism matters, because I follow a number of people in the journalism field (not everyone might see this Twitter List yet), I’d get back both “regular” search results as well as those that are from people who I follow. News.com notes that Mayer said these would appear at the bottom of regular search pages.

Other links from social sites such as Facebook or LinkedIn could also be added to your profile (any link can be added to it). To the degree Google can see your network, those can be used to filter your results.

Our Search 4.0: Social Search Engines & Putting Humans Back In Search article from last year talks more about how search results potentially can be influenced by your friends in general, plus it revisits the personalization that Google already does based on your own behavior. In some ways, the new social search that’s coming is like personalized search extended to tap into your friends and followers network.

I wish I could get more specific, but as I said, I’m limited to the details already released (and everything above is based on what’s out there from Google itself). I wish even more that I had some screenshots to show. But when I saw it last month, I joked on Twitter that I had a Scoblesque tear running down my cheek. OK, it wasn’t THAT awesome. But it was pretty impressive. I don’t see a lot of things that make me go “wow,” that’s useful. This did.

The social search product also predates today’s news that Google has a partnership with Twitter to tap into its data. That means Social Search doesn’t depend on the Twitter deal, but it certainly should help.

What exactly will Google do with the Twitter data. Are we getting a dedicated Twitter search engine like Bing Twitter Search launched today?

Google’s kind of cagey on that front. Mayer said at Web 2.0 that it will be integrated in to regular results. But what’s that mean? Integrated only using Universal Search, which could mean there’s also standalone Twitter search engine out there (just as there’s a standalone image search, news search, blog search and so on)?  Integrated to use Twitter data as part of the core ranking data?

I couldn’t get clarity on whether there will be a standalone Twitter search. Personally, I think there will be, or that there will be a combined microblog search service. We know Google has at least gotten people to translate a name for that service.

Whether that type of dedicated search for microblogged content service gets integrated into the completely different Social Search service that refines results on your social network remains to be seen.

Certainly Google sees the microblogged content as something that needs to be gathered and somehow integrated alongside web pages. Johanna Wright, director of product management at Google, talked to me today about this.

“There are things on Twitter that you can only find on Twitter,” she said, especially local happenings that might never see an actual news article written about them.

One example Wright gave, of stories she says Google is collecting, was about an art project where 2,000 “invisible dog” leashes were handed out in Manhattan. You know, those solid leashes that look like  you have an invisible dog holding them up? No one wrote a news article about this, but if you were trying to figure out what was happening if you saw people with them, the information was blogged on Twitter.

“Typically, there’s not going to be a news story on this,” Wright said. “So most people wouldn’t know why everyone around them has invisible dogs. This is the kind of information that can be found on Twitter.”

I agree. Our What Is Real Time Search? Definitions & Players article goes into more depth about microblogged content and its value to regular search. But there’s also the other major aspect, mining data of URLs that people are tweeting. Is Google planning much there?

“I think you can use them both. One thing to highlight is the background signal from Twitter, whether or not a story is breaking at Google, we have a number of signals that will tell us when a story is fresh,” Wright said.

Take That, Twitter: Google Hot Trends Integrated Into Google Search is another article from us that covers a primary signal that Google has if something is a hot topic — actual searches on Google that happen. And while Google’s has a “query deserved freshness” algorithm that can very quickly find new pages and rank them in top results, Twitter’s data potentially could make that even faster.

Stay tuned for more in the coming weeks.

For related discussion, see news on Techmeme.

Following hot on the heels of the Bing / Twitter partnership announced earlier today, Google has now also announced that it, too, has struck a deal with Twitter to include real-time tweets in Google’s search results.

“We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.”

That was published minutes ago on the official Google blog by VP Marissa Mayer. Not coincidentally, she’s due to speak shortly at the Web 2.0 Summit — where Bing made its announcements earlier today. We plan to live blog her appearance just as we did earlier when Microsoft’s Qi Lu was on stage.

Microsoft’s Qi Lu announced two new partnerships today at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Here’s a transcript of his chat with Tim O’Reilly.

Qi Lu

I was at Yahoo for 10 years, and I always told Jerry, after 10 years I’m going to try something new. I went to Microsoft because I wanted to have an impact.

Search is about computationally understanding user intent. Understanding their interests and needs. That’s “absolutely” our long-term goal – to “build a mind-reader.” Once you understand user intent, you can figure out different solutions. There are many queries where images are best at fulfilling intent. Sometimes videos are best at fulfilling intent.

Ahead, you have Facebook and Twitter – particularly Twitter. There’s a strong velocity of things flowing through that will enable people to get answers.

Yusuf Mehdi to do a demo now.

Bing launched about 100 days ago and off to a pretty good start.

People will start to ask more complicated questions. To answer that, you need better access to data. Starts demo of Bing Wave 2. Shows recent photo search tool. “It changes the way you do search.” Shows example of search for “top iPhone apps” — this has “really resonated with consumers.”

Second area is about real-time, hot information. Two announcements:

Partnership with Twitter. Been working on it a long time. We will get access to all public Twitter information in real-time. “We’re gonna do some really exciting things.”

Other partnership is with Facebook to get access to all of their public data, and that will come at a later date.

Now showing example of Twitter integration. Shows full, real-time feed. Looks like existing Twitter search, just wrapped in Bing interface. Will update automatically.

Bing applies “best Match” technology to tweets: de-duping, then focus on

quality – look at who’s tweeting and assign soicla relevance score popularity – look at the caption – length of comment, links, etc., affect quality and relevance usefulness – number of retweets affects results

Then we apply spam filtering.

Bing also shows hottest topics on Twitter – a tag cloud. Looking at tweets related to these items – Bing takes most popular links and assigns its relevance algorithm, then shows the hottest links, too.

Pick a topic like “Yankees” – Bing shows most recent tweets, then shows most popular links. Bing pulls out landing domain from shortened URLs.

This is beta code. Sean Suchter working on it at headquarters. Should be available shortly at bing.com/twitter.

Demo over. Qi Lu speaking again.

We don’t disclose financial terms with Twitter. “I don’t know specific length of agreement. This is a start.”

The key thing is to have great teams, great technology, and keep the pace of innovation.

Audience questions now.

Qi: In a real-time corpus like Twitter, there’s a lot of signal velocity. The Twitter corpus is still evolving. But based on what we see, you have enough signals to have meaningful content. A lot is meta content that refers to other content on the web. But this is just the beginning. The future is very compelling.

Are you keeping the Twitter stream? Are you archiving the firehose?

Qi Lu: Don’t want to answer because I may not be accurate.

The Twitter deal is non-exclusive.

Bing new Bing Twitter Search has gone live today, made possible through a new deal cut with Twitter. Below, a close-up look at features in the new service.

Bing Twitter? Bing Facebook? Bing Social Search?

“Bing Twitter Search” is my name for the new service. Bing tells me officially, it’s called “Bing Twitter.” That sounds awkward, two brands next to each other (as opposed to Bing Video or Bing Images, which combine the Bing brand with a generic term).

We also know that a Facebook deal has been approved, as announced today by Microsoft as part of the Bing-Twitter news. But the Facebook data hasn’t yet been implemented on Bing. Will there be a “Bing Facebook Search” service to come? Or is Bing Twitter likely to turn into “Bing Social Search” that combines Twitter and Facebook data?

Microsoft told me they don’t have anything to say on the Facebook front yet. Personally, I’m expecting we will see a Bing Social Search that combines Twitter and Facebook together, if only because today’s blog post from Bing about the new Twitter service is signed by the “Bing Social Search Team.”

Tweets Versus Links

Real time search engines are confusing creatures. Do they show actual tweets and microblogged content that people are putting out? Links that are being shared through microblog services like Twitter and Facebook? Both?

Our What Is Real Time Search? Definitions & Players article from earlier this year take a long look at this issue, and I recommend reading it to understand Bing Twitter Search better.

Bing is trying to do both. When you do a search, you’ll get tweets at the top of the page and shared links at the bottom:

How Fresh Are Your Tweets?

Let’s focus first on the tweets that Bing brings back and shows at the top of the page. Below, a look for a search on kanye west, a popular topic at the moment over rumors he’s died:

Notice the times. When I snapped this, the latest tweet was 1 minute old, followed by three that were 2 minutes old. But over at Twitter Search:

The top three results are only half a minute old. So, Bing’s missing a lot of tweets. But it’s supposed to have the Twitter “firehose” of everything that happens on Twitter virtually as it happens, so what’s up?

Demand & Ranking

Microsoft’s Sean Suchter, General Manager, Search Technology Center, says his company takes the blame. Right now, all tweets are indeed coming into Bing in real time. But then Bing is trying to remove duplicates, filter out adult content and do some other processing. That’s resulting in the delay, but Bing hopes to improve this going forward. It’s a beta, he reminded — and fair enough, especially a beta in its first day.

In the main results, tweets are sorted by date. The most recent tweet shows at the top, and new tweets push that down. That’s how Twitter Search also ranks things, and it’s a spam magnet (see Twitter’s Real Time Spam Problem).

We’ll see if Microsoft changes this order going forward. As said, they do some filtering beyond what Twitter already does. But when you “drill down” into search results, that’s where they hope the results are even more filtered by quality, popularity & usefulness. Let’s look.

Time Ranking Vs. Best Match Ranking

Notice the “more tweets” link below:

This link appears below the “tweet” search results for any search you do on Bing Twitter Search. When you click on it, you can drill further into the results (in contrast, if you were to keep scrolling down on your original search page, you’d see the “Shared Links” section.

Drilling into the results shows you more tweets, sorted by time:

See the arrow? It’s pointing at the two options you have, “Most recent” sort or “Best match” sort. By default, Most Recent is selected.

Suchter said that when you drill into results, filtering goes way up. Bing may try to drop up to 90% of retweets, for example, so that there’s variety in the results rather than everyone saying the same thing over and over.

Then there’s “Best Match” sorting:

Potentially, this should be awesome. But there are problems, as the arrows will highlight. First, though, the ideal world. There are plenty of times when you want “authoritative” tweets, and that’s what Bing promises here:

On that page, you can change the ordering to “Best Match.” Here we arrange Tweets differently. If someone has a lot of followers, his/her Tweet may get ranked higher. If a tweet is exactly the same as other Tweets, it will get ranked lower. For example, I saw a Tweet from ABC News ranked pretty high in the Best Match mode during the “boy in the balloon” fiasco. By the way, you won’t see any of your tweets if you protected or deleted them, and tweets don’t last more than 7 days in our index.

In particular, Suchter said that each tweet’s ranking is influenced by things such as:

• Estimated authority of the person tweeting (such as number of followers they have, how often they’re retweeted)
• Number of retweets a tweet has
• Freshness of the tweet

Now in the search above, what would be authoritative in a Kanye West search? To me, a tweet that makes it clear it’s not true, so we don’t get a repeat of the Jeff Goldblum death rumor (he’s still not dead, either). And look at the screenshot. The first tweet I point at shows the Miami Herald saying he’s not dead. Good job!

Not so fast. Actually, the first tweet is someone retweeting the Miami Herald saying that. Someone with 1/4 of the followers of the Miami Herald. So why isn’t the Miami Herald being shown?

Suchter said the Miami Herald probably should be up there, and that this is something his team is looking at. It’s a beta, remember?

Now look at the second link. Fox News. OK, we can debate how accurate they are. But it’s a news outlet. Good story about the rumor? Well, no. Actually, it’s Fox News trying to cash in on traffic to currently popular topics on Twitter by writing an article about currently popular topics on Twitter.

Look at the third link. Bing really, really falls down hard here. This is misleading spam, someone trying to cash in on the popularity of the search promising a Kanye “RIP” ringtone, whatever that might be.

Now you were to click on that link, Bit.ly itself would stop you with this scary warning:

Nice that Bit.ly does that — but why didn’t Bing do that for you first? After all, a big part of Bing’s announcement today — which drew applause from the audience listening at the Web 2.0 Summit — was that it would open all shortened URLs (those from bit.ly or other URL shortening services) bit.ly URLs, as you can see in the example below:

That wasn’t happening in the Kanye West search. Suchter put it down to a glitch that his team would be investigating.

Shared Links

Remember I mentioned that when you do a search on Bing, the bottom of the page is devoted to a “Shared Links” section. Here’s a close-up:

The goal here is to show you the hot and popular links that are being tweeted on your search topic. Showing top links isn’t unique. Many any other services do this, as described in my What Is Real Time Search? Definitions & Players post. However, none of those players, to my knowledge, get the fast “firehose” of data that Twitter provides.

How’s the ranking done? Each link is evaluated according to a variety of factors, such as:

• How recently is the link
• How many people are retweeting it
• What’s the authority of the people who are retweeting

Microsoft is also following the links and indexing the content of the pages. In addition, it also understands the “main” or “real” or “originating” URL even if different URL shorteners are used. Notice below how the same link from ZDnet is associated in a cluster where two different shortened URLs are used to reference it:

Notice also that for any popular URL, you see up to two people who have tweeted it. Which two? Again, accounts that are deemed relevant based on their authority, people who are retweeting them, freshness and other factors.

For any popular URL, you can drill down to learn even more about it — again, something that’s not unique to Bing’s service, but it’s still pretty cool. Click on the “more tweets” link for any URL:

Then you’ll get a full view of tweets related to that URL. By default, these are sorted in time order (I’m using a different drill down example than the screenshot above, but you should get the point. I had to go with a different page because for some reason, sometimes the drilldown doesn’t work on Bing Twitter Search):

However, you can do the “Best Match” resort. In this case, here’s Best Matches for this article you’re reading now:

Notice how the top results is not either the Search Engine Land Twitter account nor my own personal Twitter account. Instead, these are ranked 2, 3 & 4. Why wouldn’t they higher?

Again, factors include followers, how much your retweeted and how recent the tweet is. Notice that my tweets are older than the person who’s top listed.

URL Lookup

Want a warp speed way to find out what people are tweeting about your pages? Just copy and paste your page’s URL into the Bing Twitter Search query box. Your page should be listed in the top links section, and then you can drill down to see recent tweets or best match ones.

Bing Twitter Search Home Page

You don’t have to search to use Bing Twitter Search. When you arrive at the home page, you’ll see a tag cloud of popular topics:

You can click on any of these to drill down into popular topics. About the only downside to this is listing those topics on Twitter Search itself has driven up spam, people who will tweet misleading information about subjects. It’ll be interesting to see if Bing manages to stamp down on the spam within its own search results.

Below the tag cloud, you’ll see hot links being shared across Bing overall:

The red arrow in the screenshot above points to how each subject has a heading, and by clicking on the heading, you can get even more info on that topic.

Finally, when you do a search, by default new tweets will flow in automatically into the tweets section of results. You can also use the pause button to stop this:

For more, see Bing’s post about the launch and related discussion on Techmeme here.

AllThingsD has reported that Microsoft will announce a deal with Twitter today to gather its real time data. We’re able to confirm that from a source as well and provide some additional details.

The deal will make Bing the first major search engine to have access to Twitter’s “Firehose” of tweets. It’s not exclusive, however. Google potentially could still do a deal, to.

We’re told that:

• The deal will be announced today shortly after Microsoft’s Qi Lu takes the stage at the Web 2.0 conference at 11:30 Pacific Time today. Some sessions are being broadcast live here, and Lu’s might be one of them.
• There will be a standalone Twitter search service offered at Bing, with some ranking technology other than sort by date involved, and that shortened URLs will be expanded. That service should go live today.
• There will be some integration within the regular Bing service itself

Discussions to gather data from Facebook are also continuing, and there’s a chance a deal might be concluded for announcement today.

We’ll update as we learn more. To understand the importance of Twitter and Facebook data to the major search engines, see my What Is Real Time Search? Definitions & Players. It covers what Bing currently does with limited Twitter data it’s able to get now.

See related discussion at Techmeme.

Postscript: Heard back from Google:

At Google we strive to connect people to all the world’s information and this includes social and real-time information. We’re currently exploring new ways to further integrate this type of information beyond what we already offer with services such as Search, News, Profiles, Reader.

Reading between the lines there, my understanding is Google is still talking with Twitter and Facebook itself. Google’s Sergey Brin told me two weeks ago that he seemed positive some type of deal would be struck with the companies. Given the Twitter deal is non-exclusive, I’d expect that’s still likely the case.

Postscript 2: Microsoft has now confirmed the deal on stage at Web 2.0, as expected above. It has also confirmed a deal with Facebook. Financial terms aren’t being disclosed. Microsoft is not saying if there’s a particular time frame associated with it. Will the date influence Bing’s regular results, Lu was asked.

Postscript 3: From the Twitter blog, news on the deal and a strong sense that Google will get a deal eventually:

We hope more working relationships with organizations in the search business will mean even more variety for users.

See our updated posts:

• Live Today: Bing’s Twitter Search Engine
• Live Blog: Qi Lu Speaking At Web 2.0
• Google & Twitter Have A Deal, Too

Is Twitter allowing search engines access to protected tweets or not? Not, Twitter tells me, though the company probably needs to do a bit more to prevent this type of confusion in the future.

The LA Times reported yesterday about a “Twitter hole” that it believed allowed Google special access to protected tweets, tweets made from Twitter accounts where owners have deliberately chosen not to have their tweets be made public.

Not so, said TechCrunch. The so-called protected tweets that the LA Times was finding in Google looked to be those made from before particular account holders locked down their accounts.

I checked with Twitter and got back the official word from their press office:

The TechCrunch article seems to sum up the confusion pretty well. It seems that the LA Times piece references tweets that were public but later the user protected the account, thus all subsequent tweets are private along with the profile. The tweets prior to that time cannot be un-cached.

Google has not been given a key to the castle…so to speak.

I’m good with this answer except for the word I’ve bolded — that formerly public tweets cannot be uncached. That’s incorrect.

Let’s take an example. Let’s assume you started your Twitter account in March. You started tweeting publicly, then in July decided to be private. Twitter doesn’t try to protect any of your past tweets. In fact, it’s pretty clear about this in its help page on the topic:

If you have a public account and you protect it, all updates after the time of protection will be protected. Your profile will only be visible to approved followers, and existing followers will not be affected.

Please note that tweets from protected profiles will not appear in search results. People will still be able to find your account using the Find People search tool but only people you’ve approved to follow your account will be able to see your tweets. Also note that any tweets posted while your profile is private will remain private indefinitely, and tweets posted while your account is public will remain public indefinitely

But Twitter could try to protect those formerly public tweets. As best I can tell, if you lock down an account, Twitter does make ALL tweets (formerly public or not) inaccessible to everyone accept those the account holder has authorized to see them. That includes search engines like Google or a Twitter-specific search engine like Topsy.

Well, if Google can’t get in to tweets after an account has been protected, why does it show some? And why does Twitter say this will happen?

Google seems to rely on the last information for a tweet that it could see. So you tweeted something in March. Google sees the tweet and records it. If in August, you protect your account. Google tries to revisit your tweets as it does with any web page, to make sure it has fresh information. It can’t get to any of your tweets now.

The ones from August, it never saw them, since they were never public — so it doesn’t list them.

That tweet in March? It keeps showing the information from the last time it saw it. And apparently, it will keep doing this for weeks or months.

Google didn’t send me a comment about this (I did ask, and I might get one later today). But that’s just how I know Google works and can see it specifically working with some protected tweets I investigated today.

As for Topsy, they told me:

Topsy only displays tweets that were once public. The refresh button will make them vanish if the account is now private.

Back to Google. Eventually it should update its old copy of the tweet with what it currently shows to non-authorized visitors, a message that says “This person has protected their tweets” (you can see this for millions of people on Google now).

Twitter could speed that process along by explicitly blocking tweets from a protected account with a meta robots tag configured to remove the page from the index entirely and from cached copies being allowed (the NOINDEX, NOARCHIVE commands).

That wouldn’t guarantee that formerly public tweets are all taken private, of course. Once something’s put out on the public web, it’s very difficult to pull it back. But it could help and seems an easy enough change to do.

If you have a protected account, also keep in mind that those who follow you might retweet what you tweet to the world. If you’re that worried, make sure you pick your followers carefully and regularly keep them informed that you don’t want things retweeted. Otherwise, be prepared for your private tweets to leak out.

For more about search and tweets, see my What Is Real Time Search? Definitions & Players post which cover some ways to make use of Google and its search options feature to drill-down into tweets.

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
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