The bar has just been raised again on Twitter search. PostPost is a search engine that searches through your tweets and 200 of your followers. It's currently searching through a collection of 250,000+ tweets of mine and followers. I can't unfortunately see a list of which followers or how they were chosen though, which is a nuisance, and I can't tell it which to index, so that's a bit of a pain. However, to balance that out, there's a bunch of good stuff.
Here's their video to get you started.
Our second screencast! from PostPost on Vimeo.
I can run a search on any term or terms as you'd expect. I can then limit that search to specific individuals, which is really helpful in tracking down a particular post. I can also get a display of tweets with links in them, or with photographs. I can then limit that to specific individuals. I can't actually go to the next step though, of limiting search to a specific person's tweets with photographs in them AND a keyword, so that's a slight frustration. However, that's a fairly minor point.
PostPost also saves your searches, and provides access to existing searches, and also allows one click access to mentions of you and key people you follow. They also do one click results for reviews and commentaries on films, apps and games, although you can't choose your own defaults for this, which is a slightly irritation again.
However, in total, it's a really nice engine, and I like the personal aspects, because that's what I'm most interested in - I follow people because I respect and value their opinions, and this provides me with a really easy way to retrieve them. I'm certainly adding this to my collection of engines.
Hi Phil. Brad from PostPo.st here.
Thanks for the post.
On a couple of your concerns:
1. the number 200
We use this number to determine what to index, but if any of the people you follow are also PostPo.st users, you'll have access to more than your initial core 200 when you search.
I take your point about allowing users to augment who gets indexed. We're looking at that. Hope your happy with the results, despite not having that fine-tune control for now.
2. On this point: "I can't actually go to the next step though, of limiting search to a specific person's tweets with photographs in them AND a keyword, so that's a slight frustration."
You can do this. Start with your keyword search, and then use the 'links' and 'photos' filters just above the results. (You can also use these in combination with the friends that run down the left side of the page.)
Happy searching!
Posted by: Brad Noble | April 30, 2011 at 09:42 PM
Hi Phil. Quick note to let you know we've dramatically improved search speed and link, photo and video searching on PostPo.st.
Hope you get a chance to take a look.
Posted by: Brad | May 21, 2011 at 02:00 PM