Tweepz Brings Exalead Search to Twitter
by Bill Ives
I have written about Exalead before, see Exalead’s CloudView Offers Integrated Search Capabilities. They have a web search tool like Google that is used in widely in France and other parts of Europe. The CloudView product looked inside the entoerise. Now they have a new web tool addressed at Twitter.
Exalead’s Jochem Prins built Tweepz in about five man-days. It went live quietly on March 16, 2009. It currently indexes about a quarter of Twitter users. Tweepz, allows users to find people on Twitter by name, location, or bio and navigate and refine these searches further by extracted metadata, language, follower ranges, etc. It’s built on Exalead technology to employ full-text search, natural language processing, and smart classification.
You can also filter your results. You can narrow your results by number of followers, the language they speak or extracted entities (key words which show up in their bios) all of these divided into percentile ranges. RSS feeds for specific queries are available, as is the simple ability to tweet the results you are seeing.
Tweepz also hopes to index the content of Twitter users’ nominated URLs in the future, thus offering a larger scope and capacity to return meaningful search results. I wonder of they will take this into the enterprise also and look at enterprise micro-messaging tools?
