Ever wanted to find out what people are talking about…right now? Now you can! Topsy is a new search engine that looks for what people are talking about in various social communities. The search engine is listening to everything posted on Twitter, capturing all your tweets. While Twitter is the only data source at the moment, I find it interesting that it indexes the reviews people write, things posted on Facebook and other social web avenues. 

The company that created the search engine, Topsy Labs Inc., began the developing in 2006. The launch of the new engine happened earlier this week causing a stir in the online world. Now, how does Twitter connect with this? Topsy is using Twitter to gauge relevance and giving the searcher “real-time” data. Research shows that the people that use Twitter tend to tweet about three hours per day. That is a lot of information getting posted everyday!

So how does Topsy look at your conversations? Basically, if you are out on Twitter, and someone else tweets something you posted (essentially repeating the comment), you get the credit for it. It is referred to as a “retweet”. In a nutshell, it looks at the number of retweets that are produced, and it also finds results based on the Twitter users with more influence as well.

Michael Arrington from TechCrunch explains it best by stating, “Some of those users have more influence than others. And some links are sent by lots of Twitter users, others just sent once. Those links, combined with the information in the Twitter message itself, is what Topsy uses as the basis of its search engine.”

As you do a search in Topsy, the listing at the top is the most cited link. To the right of the listing, you see who the tweeters that are the biggest influencers based on your search. Soon, Topsy will grab influencers not only from Twitter, but other social web data sources. But it doesn’t stop there! You can also search for a topic filtering your date. Data only goes back to September of 2008, but it still lets you sort by day, month, previous weeks or for all time.

On TechCrunch.com, you can read Arrington’s article and watch a video where he interviews the creators of Topsy and how it works.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/26/topsy-search-launches-retweets-are-the-new-currency-of-the-web/

While the search engine is still fairly new, the team at Topsy Labs, Inc. have more in the works. The timeline is not set, but they do request feedback on the site. As most launches go, there will be continuous tweekery to Topsy as the team refines the search engine. Stay tuned for the changes.

Check out the new search engine at www.Topsy.com.

Do you think that “real-time” search is just a fad or possibly redefining the future of search?