In its effort to index the world -- or at least cyberspace -- Google is rumored to be working on a microblogging search engine. Although live search is not Google's forte, that isn't stopping it from creating a MicroBlogSearch tool. So say the folks that write the unaffiliated Google Operating System blog, who caught a hint of the new tool in Google's localization service tool.
The blog describes the new search service:
"Much like Google Blog Search, Google's microblogging search service will sort the results by relevancy and it also be integrated with Google's web search engine: the keywords that are frequently used in recent posts will trigger a MicroBlogsearch universal search group."
Twitter is the major target of the search, but by all means, wouldn't be the only microblogging service to be indexed. In fact, Google may be thinking of extending the service to include "micro-messages" as well, which is not well defined, but probably includes things like social networking status updates. The goal of such a service isn't just to keep a massive record of every tweet in the world, but to be able to spot trends by watching the search terms, just as Google does today with its other search services.
On the one hand, it might be good thing to have a single place to search all applications with microblog features including Friendfeed, Plurk, even Google's own Jaiku, purchased by Google in 2007.
On the other, who uses anything but Twitter? And search engines for Twitter abound, most of them real time, with the kind of nifty features that Google can't match. One of our personal favorites is TwitPipe, a tool that offers a realtime stream of tweets based on keywords as well as the ability to search.
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