List of Twitter Search Engines

1. Twitter Search: a good base line. Note that it doesn’t provide search over URLs (they are all hidden behind the shortening services). I’m also suspicious of seeing duplicates in the results, but haven’t really looked to hard at this issue.
2. BackTweets: this is where I like to go for URL search over twitter.
3. IceRocket: I was surprised to see these guys still going and that they were doing something with Twitter. I’m not sure how they are getting data, but they seem to have quite a bit of it.
4. Scoopler: the latest thing on the radar (thanks Eric).
5. TwazzUp: not too dissimilar to Twitter Search
6. TweeFind: again, more like a clone of Twitter Search
7. Tinker: this is certainly more my kind of thing – trend graphs over events people are talking about on Twitter!

To me, the most interesting of these is BackTweets, Scoopler and Tinker.

For a broader list (including things a little orthogonal to search) check out Phil Bradley’s post Twitter Search which includes 20 services.

If you know of any other credible engines, please leave a comment (there are plenty of things out there that look like Twitter search engines, but aren’t).

Comments

[Anton]

Just have to give a tip about our Twingly.com/microblogsearch. It's not only results from twitter so microblog posts from jaiku, identi.ca etc could appear too =)

[Alexandre]

Is there any of these services that can search in twitter archives ? search.twitter.com used to, but for a couple of months, it has limited the scope to only one month.

[Brendan O'Connor]

Here's an experimental one we just released last week. no timeseries info (yet) but some clustering-like summarization stuff.

http://tweetmotif.com/

http://anyall.org/blog/2009/05/announcing-tweetmotif-for-summarizing-twitter-topics-with-a-dash-of-nlp/