Hey! Hello.
Yes, we all know how useful Twitter can be with the real-time search thingy. And it’s also great for knowing what has catched the world’s fancy lately. But there is a bit of a snag with Twitter. It doesn’t provide you with tools for following the trends.
So, say I am someone interested in the performance of the word “game” on twitter. I am interested in how the keyword has been performing over time. Think of this keyword in terms of brands – Is it gaining favor? Becoming popular? Or loosing value? Twitter has that data for me, what it doesn’t have is the view (or call it the report).
How do we find it? Luckily, someone else has all the tools we might ever need for making sense from all the data in the world – yup – Google! All we do is blend Twitter and Google Search and Presto! You got your trending reports Einstein!
How did we do that? Its pretty simple. We use the “SITE” operator in our Google Search. Since, our keyword was “game“, we run a Google Search for “site:twitter.com game“, which basically means – search for all pages on the site twitter.com that has the word game on it. Now, on twitter, all your tweets are also treated as individual pages (for want of a better word). So, you get a listing of all tweets from across the world about game. Now, if you don’t see the very-useful sidebar in the Google Search results, click on More Options linnk and you get the sidebar. Now, all we need is the Timeline view.
Yup, that solves it! What say you?
The only trouble now is that many times it will return data that is not very useful for us. Until next time, we keep looking for the perfect solution.
