Twitter search sites: The best and the rest

There are several other real-time search products. Some are highly specialised, or have weaknesses that offset strengths, but many are still very useful for specific needs. 

OneRiot only searches items that have links in them. This provides a useful built-in filter for finding a great deal of good information on the Web, but OneRiot won't find text-only tweets. Besides that limitation, it's a very strong service, with options to switch between ranked and raw results, a special tab for shared video links, and a pleasing, clean design. OneRiot searches Twitter, Digg, YouTube and other services.

Tweetmeme is a stellar tool for discovering what's hot on Twitter, since it's all about the act of re-tweeting. It's not a great search engine, though. See also DailyRT, which has a better search function, including the capability to search only within the network of people you follow.

Monitter gives you a multi-column view of real-time Twitter search results (with no ranking), which makes it useful for monitoring several queries at once. Its special trick is that you can easily filter results by the location that Twitter users report in their profiles.

Topsy does a very good job of helping you to find the most influential people on the topic you're searching for. It ranks results by links to the items in question, which is useful, if not exactly real-time. There's no option for 'live' results.

CrowdEye gives you stats on your query, and popular links related to it, but the results page is static. It's useful if you want to see how a search query is trending over time.

Keep an eye on Itpints, Twitority, Twitalyzer Search, Twitmatic and Yauba, which gave us uneven experiences but could improve quickly. Some other engines search Twitter, but aren't designed to provide real-time results -- Tweefind is one example.

Also, Twitter clients like TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop, and specialised online Twitter management tools like CoTweet, have search functions in them that may fit with your Twitter workflow.

As far as the big, old-school search companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft go: don't count them out forever. We're 100 per cent sure that they are all looking for ways to set their search offerings apart and have their eyes on some of these companies as acquisition targets. Why do you think there are so many start-ups chasing this problem, after all?