On the Radar…

Today Boulder-based OneRiot released an alpha version of its Twitter Search, which takes a unique approach to crawling the increasingly popular micro-blogging site. OneRiot, a company determined to “find the pulse of the internet,” applies this same strategy to Twitter by only producing search results that include URL links, or web addresses that Twitter customers are referencing. For example, in researching this article I used the OneRiot Twitter Search to find “OneRiot,” and the site returned a page of tweets that linked to technology blog reviews of the new service, including betanews, ReadWriteWeb, and Search Engine Land. A nice feature embedded in the search results is that OneRiot expands shortened URLs – a common habit in the character-constrained Twittersphere – so a user can get a sense of a link’s identity before leaping from the results page. Other features of the search include displaying the number of times a specific URL was shared, revealing the tweets with the embedded address, and noting the first person to reference the URL. And like its video and web search products, OneRiot Twitter Search displays a list of “trending topics” that the company defines as keywords popular within Twitter at any given moment of the day. At 5:00 pm on Thursday, April 2nd those topics were “Chicago Bears,” “G20” and “Bruno.” The Twitter search function will remain separate from the video and web products as the company collects feedback on user experience.