Although Google indexes many web pages within minutes, it has never been particularly useful at getting breaking, recent results. There is a difficult-to-utilize feature that lets users find only pages from the previous day or week, but this is inadequate to many searcher’s needs.

Often, what is most useful is Twitter Search. Whenever there is a plane crash or an earthquake somewhere, I go to Twitter first.

While I understand many people believe Twitter is over hyped, the hype is for real right now. Twitter is hitting the pop culture mainstream as we speak. It’s founders are appearing on Charlie Rose, Jon Stewart is talking about it, and more and more mainstream cable news shows (such as CNN’s Rick Sanchez) are taking user input through Twitter.

Now, a Firefox add-on built on Greasemonkey lets users see the five most recent Tweets on the subject the user searches for with Google on Firefox. Here’s an example of the search “Rush Limbaugh:”

I used it immediately, searching for “twitter charlie rose” and finding a link to the Charlie Rose interview through a Tweet.

It will be interesting to see how much I use it. I’ll check in a few weeks from now and let everybody know how useful it actually is.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 12:02 amand is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.