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What Treasures Can You Find On Twitter?

Felix — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 07:06:00 +0000

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 New Visual Search Experience

Felix — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 10:44:00 +0000

As video and image content on the web becomes more prevalent and compelling, search engines are finding new and innovative ways for users to search and browse through these rich contents and provide a more visual search experience. Google Image search is great but the interface is really built on top of the traditional text web search and hasn’t evolved along with the type of rich content available now and user’s expectation in terms of searching for visually rich contents.

There has been various visual search engines that caters for these needs, they are really a special type of aggregation search engine that focus on video and images contents using a number of search engines such as Google and Yahoo. These search engines are visually rich with very innovative user interface that are completely different from your traditional web search experience and you primarily browse and decide on where you want to drill into from the results set based on images or screen shots of the websites.

One of these visual search engines is SearchMe which display screen shots of the page and images in the results in an iTunes Cover Flow like layout that is familiar to iTunes users. This allows you to quickly decide which website to focus on based on the look of it by flicking through them.

CoolIris which is one my favourite alternative search engines is another visual search engine that is taking the idea of cover flow to the next level to provides a completely new and unique search experience.

As an example, when I search for “iPhone leather case” the look of the case is probably of the utmost importance to me as a searcher. additional, the ability to visually browse through all type of leather cases quickly and efficiently is also of benefit to me as a searcher. This is exactly what Cooliris allow you to do!

Cooliris not so much as provides a cover flow layout but more of a cover WALL layout that gives you the feeling of walking pass a continuous walls of images that stretches indefinitely after you do a search. You can use the same unique search interface to search through Flickr, and YouTube and find your results in a wall of images. The shopping search option is particular useful as it not only lists images of the product you are searching for but also include the price and a link to where you buy it. I must say it works very very well. This visually rich experience is achieved through a browser plugin for both IE and Firefox and the the result is indeed a very un-browser like experience.

The layout is not only beautiful but effective. I personally think it is one of the most effective design in terms of searching for and browsing through visually rich contents.

More importantly, what is it good for ? Searching for images and video from multiple sites is an obvious area where you can have a lot of fun. If you are searching for ideas or products and are primarily interest in how it looks, Cooliris can definitely make you life a lot easier and make the search experience more interesting.

As an added bonus, CoolIris also offer an iPhone app version of its search engine which amazingly delivers a similar visual experience using the comparatively much smaller iPhone screen!

Definitely worth checking out!Similar Posts:

Tell me more about this product

Felix — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 23:47:33 +0000

If you are a keen gadget user and online shopper, then you would be familiar with the experience of Googling your product of interest, checking out the product specification on the manufacturer’s website, trawling through online forums, reading all the online reviews about the product you can find and even having a pick at the product manual if you are really keen. Well, according to Retrevo, they can do all of the “CLICK WORKS” for you and save you from searching around the web so that you can focus on reading the relevant information.

Retrevo has been live Since late 2006 and has been continuously refining their services. I checked out their latest version recently and found it to be a fantastic service and they seem to have all the angles covered when it comes to product search.

I did a search for “SqueezeBox” which is a kick ass MP3 steamer from Logitech and Retrevo returned me a nice list of top results from review articles, forums, manufacturer info, heck it even returned me a screenshot of the product manual and a download link for the PDF file ! Pretty impressive. It even recognised that I am searching for some sort of MP3 player and suggest that I click on their top 10 MP3 players link.

You then have the options of drilling in and seeing more results from thee individual sections.

Click on the Top 10 MP3 Players link then takes me to a special product advisor page on MP3 Players

They seem to have compiled a list top products from various categories and ranked them based on scoring provided by the Retrevo user community. Great idea to leverage the social aspects of product searching and comparison, the results however is a bit interesting as I have never heard of the number 1 product presented here for MP3 player (Cowon D2) then again, maybe I am missing out on a fantastic product, maybe something I need to look into….

Just to check for their coverage of the latest products I did anther search for “HTC Touch Cruise” which is a smart phone that was due to be released around the world as I am typing this article, and here is the result I got.

No product manual provided but still a decent effort in terms of manufacturer’s info, reviews and blogs presented. I suspect there is a little bit of manual work required in the background to provide the full suite of information for each products.

Just in case you have been tempted by the overwhelming positive information you have seen on a particular product, Retrevo also provide direct link to the product page from various online vendors where you can purchase the product instantly. No surprise here as I also suspect this is one of their primary source for revenue.

Would I rely solely on the Retrevo service for my product research now ? NO, would I supplement (or even start my product research) on Retrevo ? Yes as it does do a good job of aggregating relevant contents (and links) into a single location and provide a good high level overview for a particular product.

For me, a search and scan through online product review is one of the most important aspects of searching about a product, and a quick search for “SqueezeBox Review” on Google gave me a result of which the top 3 does not even show up on Retrevo’s list of product reviews for SqueezeBox. This along will warrant me to at least always Google product reviews separately from Retrevo as when it comes to returning the best answer on a particular topic, I would rely on Google over Retrevo any day.Similar Posts: