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Twitter rolls out a stylish new homepage this week and is finally promoting real-time search front and center. Up until now, when talking with friends about the true power of Twitter lying in it’s real-time search capabilities, some seemed to not fully grasp the concept. Hopefully the new design will help more users understand how it works.

“See what people are saying about…” are the instructions above the new search box, and appropriately so. Twitter allows you to search what users are tweeting about up to the second.

A search for “social media” displays the latest post from @CrystalGibson, “Social media may well be the pain reliever we have all needed-the medicine that makes advertising relevant and welcome in our lives.”

The new Twitter tagline reads, “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world.”

Below the search bar we find popular topics displayed by the minute, day and week.

Viewing search.twitter.com still displays the old design but you can anticipate they will be updating that soon too.

If you haven’t been living under a rock recently you are well aware of Microsoft’s latest foray into the search market with Bing. The latest buzz word in Web search is “real-time” lead by the constant flow of 140 character posts from the Twitter platform. Many companies have been attempting to harness this information in the form of real-time search engines. Some recent contenders include Topsy, OneRiot, CrowdEye, and now Bing.

Bing’s real-time search experiment as of right now is only indexing results for popular tweeters. It’s still unclear on how they plan on delivering these results as my own tests have been varied. For example if I search for “Al Gore” on Bing I do not see anything related to Twitter. If I search “Al Gore Twitter” I see some results at the bottom of the page. However if I search “@algore” the Twitter results are right at the top.

I tried a second test with “TechCrunch” and this time I do see tweets at the bottom of the page. “TechCrunch Twitter” delivers the results at the top of the page, as does “@techcrunch“.

Search heavyweight Google as of yet has not launched any products to index Twitter content (outside of user pages), but rumors of a Google microblogging search engine have been surfacing.

You voiced opinions about the new iPhone 3G S pricing on Twitter, and AT&T listened. Recent news regarding a $200 charge for many current iPhone users to upgrade to the new 3G S model stirred up a swarm of negative feedback posts across the Twitter platform. After hearing what you had to say, AT&T has reconsidered it’s pricing strategy and is now offering discounted iPhone upgrades to more customers.
 
Those of you who may not use Twitter or don’t really understand what it’s all about need to check out Twitter’s search page. Due to the massive adaptation of Twitter you can search for a keyword such as “iPhone” and find the latest talk on the subject. The true power of Twitter is real-time search. So while many people are talking about what they had for lunch and what they’re planning to do this Friday night, many are also telling you where they had lunch, how the food was, what movie they’re going to see tonight, and what they think about Apple’s new iPhone. This is powerful information that companies and marketers cannot ignore.

As the exchange of information on the Web increasingly approaches the now, innovators at Topsy Labs Inc have launched a real-time search engine built off of Twitter’s API. With $15 million in venture funding, co-founder Gary Iwatani isn’t the only one banking on the success of Topsy’s search technology. “We’ve architected what we believe is a next-generation platform for search on the Web,” Iwatani told VentureWire.

Traditionally search giants such as Google have dismissed content from social media sources to reduce spam within search results, reliant on the model of link popularity along with favoring original relevant content when indexing websites. Topsy frontmen, who also founded anti-spam company Cloudmark Inc, are no amateurs when it comes to filtering out the junk. By watching signals, such as the authors who or are producing spam messages, they can more effectively filter out the trash tweets and bring relevant information to the top of search results.

While technically Topsy may be a Twitter app at the moment, the potential for it’s real-time search technology to expand to other social media charts a potentially strong future for this company.

Check out the video for more insight on how Topsy works…

Source: Venture Capital Dispatch