Twitter has added real-time search features to its popular micro-blogging service which it is describing as “a discovery engine for finding out what is happening right now.”
The company said it is now in a position to be able to analyse the message or ‘tweets’ that are being sent across its service to detect when certain user-specified keywords or phrases occur with higher frequency.
“These trending phrases are surfaced in the Twitter home page and updated throughout the day” the company said in its official blog.
“With the addition of search, you can ask Twitter to build a fresh timeline of updates based on a keyword or phrase.”
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone noted on the Twitter blog that the search function will also be useful for companies to track positive and negative buzz about their brands in real-time.
Twitter’s search engine stems from the technology the business acquired with the search business of Summize.
The Summize application crawls online reviews and blog discussions to create summarised reviews of music, movies, books and the like. It called itself a tool for ‘conversation search.’
