On Tuesday, Google announced plans to roll out a Twitter search engine. A limited version of that search feature was released earlier today, allowing users to search tweets dating back to February.
The new feature is reminiscent of the timeline search function that Google released a few years back, but focusing on tweets rather than web content. After entering a search query, the user is presented with a timeline of tweets. Users can then click a specific date and see all the tweets on the subject for that day.
The new Twitter search engine will be especially useful for marketers. By using the timeline, marketers will be able to see when there were spikes in conversations about their product.
"The conversation to date has been about what’s happening right now," Dylan Casey, a product manager at Google overseeing the project, told CNET. "But now, searchers will be able to find tweets related to something that happened in the past, at both a national news level and at a local event level."
Twitter search engines have been a hot topic this week, with Twitter and TweetUp also announcing search platforms. What impact they will have, if any, on the search engine optimization (SEO) landscape is still unclear.
