I love searching Twitter.

And I love sharing how a Twitter search can dramatically impact student research, by connecting them with experts, encouraging them to develop current awareness, allowing them to listen in on the dialog of a particular field or niche, and, in some cases, enabling them to contribute to the conversation.

Learning to search social media is the new learning to search. (See my earlier post on curation as the new search.)

I regularly use Twitter’s own search as well as TweetDeck and Kred (once I am logged in) to scan and search the hashtags and keywords.

But, Topsy is a game changer.

The free comprehensive index and social analysis tool, searches keywords, hashtags and @ signs from minutes ago or from across a span of years, retrieving your social needles from millions of haystacks of billions of tweets.

Topsy is a way to instantly discover breaking news and just released press-releases and track current conversations and just posted media.

#tlchat influencers

Topsy also presents proof that what you tweet is not ephemeral.  Recently, the San Francisco start-up announced that it has indexed every little message, with every little link, since the very first tweet was tweeted back in 2006.  So I may just use this in my e-reputation talk during our  Juniors’ college search lesson.

The opening screen allows search by

A pull-down menu allows users to sort results by relevance or by most or least recent.  Filters on the left panel allow searchers to select time frames, media, links, and to search tweets in ten languages.  Searchers may also choose to add the influencers filter to a search, perhaps as they attempt to assess credibility.

#syria current awareness