Now that Twitter has added a search box on its home page, I often get people asking me why would I ever want to search through twitter? After all, isn’t it all about people going on about what they had for breakfast? Whilst it is true there are plenty of comments about breakfast cereals on Twitter, there are actually useful treasures if you know what you are looking for. Here are some ideas and examples of of some of the treasures that you might find useful but didn’t know that you can find on twitter!

• Find A Good Deal

This is probably one the most powerful and useful use of Twitter search and one that any bargain hunter needs to pay close attention to.

Many companies today are starting to use Twitter to promote and offload their excess stocks. Companies such as Dell regularly broadcast sales and discount stock through Twitter, It is great for finding good deals on all sorts of products when buying online, in fact, its probably a good idea to search through twitter when buying anything online as a couple of extra keyboard strokes might just save you a few bucks.

Whilst you can search directly on the twitter website for discount codes such as “Dell Discount Code”, there are also specialist twitter deal search sites such as CheapTweet that aggregates discount related tweets publishers and not only can help you find discount coupon codes, but also list general sales promotions that retail outlets are offering at a particular time, highly recommended for any bargain hunters!

• Stock Tips

The real-time nature of Twitter makes it a perfect platform for sharing Stock market related news, announcements, tips and discussions (or rumours!). You can also sometimes find links to useful analyst reports or analysis on a particular company that have just been published and that might influence your buy or sell decision. The trick is to filter out all the noisy tweets (and there are plenty!) by adding useful keywords and exclude noisy keywords for a particular search or use the advanced search options to add addition filter such as date range and hashtags.

If you follow a particular analyst or stock related site that publishes tweets, you can also use the advanced search function to search through tweets from a particular user.

For example, here is twitter search on What @TheMotleyFool has said about Google.

• Check for the Status of Web Services

Not so much treasures but definitely useful nonetheless is the ability to check for critical online services through twitter search. When you are having issues with Gmail or Hotmail, or Skype,  it is often hard to work out whether the issue is due to the latest browser update you did, the new corporate firewall policy or something else. A quick search on twitter can often give you an idea if it is indeed a general outage from the service provider and save you the hassle of ringing up your Internet provider or corporate support desk.

Not only will the twitter search find other user’s experiences with the service, you might also find officially announcements from the service provider. You just might find links to posts on whether it is a scheduled downtime and when is it due to come back up. I have personally use the twitter search on Gmail down numerous times to work out what is going on with Gmail when I am having issue with it and see what the word on the street is, and found it a great time saver!

Go on, have a search on twitter, you just might find some other treasures, if you do, make sure you share it in the comments section below!

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The popularity of the Twitter Service has created a lot of chatters, chatters that are

1. Less than 140 characters long,
2. Very easy to publish anytime, anywhere, ANY PLATFORM
3. Mostly rubbish about what people had for lunch!

However, similarly to what happened to the evolution of blogs, more reputable (and knowledgeable!) people and companies are starting to use twitter as a mean of communicating, branding and marketing mechanism. As a result, there are actual quite a lot useful information in the tweets that people produce today.

Now in order to leverage these information you can follow people’ tweets all day, or you can search people’s tweet, for me, searching is a better use of my time and that’s when a number of the new conversational search service comes in handy.

Twitter search allows to search for what about what is happening now and what people are talking about now. The results are gathered from people’s tweet now or in the last hour or so and hence the other name given to this type of search “Realtime Search”

Whilst you are mostly searching through people’s chatters which are not exactly high quality content, it does have some interesting and useful applications. Firstly, since it is much easier to twitter than to setup a blog site and provide good blog content, you will see contents you normally don’t see in blogs from people who don’t really know how to blog. What good is this search and what useful information can you find? I can think of at least 4 applications:

1. Verify whether some web service is down: There has been numerous time when I am having issues with Gmail and I wasn’t sure whether it was Gmail or something wired with my wireless/network/firewall/ISP, a quick search on twitter will easily reveal whether 3 millions other web users are complaining about the same thing. 

2. Product Release: Twitter now is often the first place you hear about new product releases.

3. Search for discount coupons: This one I am keen to try out one day.

4. The very latest gossips about _ _ _: Now this could be a celebrity, politician or anything you have a interested about and can not wait for the bloggers to catch up.

I’d like to think of Twitter search as “a box of chocolates, and you never know what you gonna get!” hence the best way to find out its value and effectiveness is to just try it out.

If you use Firefox You can even integrate Twitter Search Results right into your normal Google Search Results by following these tips from the good folks at Lifehacker.

I am now so excited about what I will find in Twitter every time I do a Google Search!

Since Twitter is not the only realtime microblogging service, we are also starting to see the emergence of meta search engine or search aggregation site that allow you to search across these micro blogging sites such as Twitter and Friendfeed. One such site is Whostalkin.

I personally think this is one of the most exciting search development since the Googzilla has taken control of our search experience, watch out for this space!

I am also pretty sure there are lot of other interesting applications of conversational/realtime searching, so let us know what you think!

UPDATE: Just came across this fantastic post by Chris Allison on how to get the most out of your Twitter search with tips on how to use the advanced search features!Similar Posts:

• What Treasures Can You Find On Twitter?
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