In October, I first introduced Searchtastic, a new search engine for Twitter, whose claim to fame is archiving Tweets longer than the standard database, as well as letting you refine your search through live addition and deletion of keywords. This weekend, the site upgraded with a minor addition that has major potential - the ability to export search results to Microsoft Excel databases with a single click. This opens up significant opportunity for marketing and sales teams alike who are looking to track who discusses their brand or select keywords, and track this data offline.

As social media aware businesses are looking closely at Twitter and other online networks for potential prospects and influencers, it comes as no surprise that it would be desired that these future customers be stored in the company's CRM, or as part of a marketing database, even if not all the information is complete. Also, as third party social media contractors are often hired to find these folks, there becomes a need to compile frequent mentions of your brand and products and report into Marketing or Sales.



Any Searchtastic Result is Now Exportable to an .xls File
Now, I can go to Searchtastic, enter a keyword or string of words, and see the results, powered by standard Twitter search.

For example, I may search for the word Maytag.

On the right side of the search results from Searchtastic, there is a new function that says "Excel Report". If I click that, I am asked to enter a simple number-based Captcha, and the report is downloaded.

Included in the report are all the relevant details around the mentions, including:

• Login of the individual
  
• Name listed on Twitter
  
• Homepage provided on their profile
  
• Location (if reported)
  
• Followers (by number)
  
• Following (by number)
  
• Total Tweets
  
• Tweet Date (of the mention)
  
• Tweet (the tweet in its entirety)
  
• In Reply To (the URL of a reply, if there is one)

Then, the smart marketer can sort by location, if they have a geographical focus, or by total number of followers, to see perceived "influence" and reach, by total tweets to figure out how frequently the person updates, or by time, if they want to work the list sequentially.

Since our initial report on Searchtastic, the developer has made a number of behind the scenes enhancements, fixing search string bugs, adding the expansion of URLs from URL shorteners, and migrating to more powerful servers to enable a greater number of tweets for indexing. You can check out Searchtastic at http://www.searchtastic.com. It is obvious to me that this new addition could be very powerful and useful. I will absolutely be using this.

As previewed in a scoop by All Things Digital's Kara Swisher, Twitter has enabled Microsoft's Bing search engine to have access to the full firehose of all public tweets, adding these real-time elements to the company's data pool. In a post confirming the partnership, Twitter called the onslaught of updates an "overwhelming deluge", hoping that Bing could help you find those that make sense for your search query "right now".

Solving search and discovery for Twitter Search has been extremely challenging for the San Francisco-based startup, and the company's incomplete database has led to a swarm of competition, notably that of Searchtastic most recently, who gave top billing to the fact their index dived deeper than Twitter.

This obviously is no free transaction, so it is safe to say Twitter clearly has revenue today. And more will come as the company promises the development of meaningful relationships with companies that share their vision of creating value for users - be they big companies or small ones. More on the announcement can be seen on the Bing blog.

Update: (I just received this via e-mail from a Bing PR rep)

Hi Louis,

This morning at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Qi Lu, President of Microsoft’s Online Services Division is announcing a new beta feature that enables people to easily search Twitter’s real-time information feed directly in Bing. This new feature helps people make better decisions and more fully understand Twitter conversations by collecting, analyzing and uniquely presenting real-time Twitter content.

More specifically, the new Twitter developments in Bing include:

A real-time index of the Tweets that match your search queries in results. This feature makes it easier to follow what’s going on by reducing the amount of duplicates, spam, and adult content.

Giving you the option to rank tweets either by most recent or by “best match,” where we consider a Tweeter’s popularity, interestingness of the tweet, and other indicators of quality and trustworthiness.

Providing the top links shared on Twitter around your specific search query by showcasing a few of the most relevant tweets. Additionally, Bing automatically expands those small URLs (like bit.ly) to enable you to understand what people are tweeting about. Instead of showing standard search result captions, we select 2 top tweets to give users a glimpse of the sentiment around the shared link.

You can try out the new Bing Twitter search beta here momentarily or learn more about it at the Bing blog. Please note that this is a U.S. only feature at this time.

Facebook Partnership

As part of his on-stage discussion at the summit, Dr. Lu is also announcing a global partnership with Facebook that will bring public Facebook status updates to Bing search results. The experience will be available at a later date.

Practically everybody is putting their data into Twitter these days. With an increasing velocity of tweets, it has become an escalating challenge to find data from this real-time information archive, made even more difficult by the limitations of the company's default search engine, which only displays information in the last week to two weeks. With others, including Twazzup, Collecta and OneRiot, trying their hand at finding the information in Tweetspace, a new engine has launched today, called Searchtastic. As it's so new, it's more "search" than "-tastic", but they promise future features in the coming weeks that will help the engine improve.

Searchtastic bills itself as "smart Twitter search". On launch day, there are really two major features that would have you using Searchtastic over the standard Twitter search.

The first benefit is that Searchtastic is archiving tweets longer than Twitter search (as discussed previously, there are issues). This means that tweets from more than two weeks ago may be available on their engine, but not the standard interface, giving your more results and data to work with.

The second benefit is that if you want to hone your search by adding or removing keywords, to do so is very simple. Click on keywords in search results to add them to your next query, or click on a word you just searched to remove it.


Searchtastic Finds Tweets on "Tweetie" from @scobleizer
Searchtastic also says its ability to provide "instant access to the most followed users" on their top 100 page is a feature, but I don't care so much for that, and there are other places to find beneficiaries of the controversial Suggested User List (SUL).


A Familiar Sight on Searchtastic
I tested Searchtastic, comparing it to the standard Twitter search, and it definitely provides more total results, going back longer, to the beginning of September, which is likely when they started indexing. But searches took longer to execute, and you certainly don't get any of the "trending topics" that bubble to the top of Twitter elsewhere. In fact, searching on "LSU", a currently trending topic on Twitter, without specifying a user name, simply provided me a bunch of tweets from PerezHilton complaining that "#TmobileStillSucks". So that was not what I had wanted.


Searchtastic Finds Tweets on "Spam" from @mattcutts

Adding the term "Twitter" to "Spam" from @mattcutts
The utility of Searchtastic looks to be when you want to search a specific user for a specific tweet, or see what that person has said about a particular topic. It's not a substitute for searching all of Twitter globally, and the highlighting of "top users" seems redundant. But if Twitter Search is drawing a blank where you know there should be results, maybe Searchtastic has it.