Topsy Social Search Engine

I wrote recently about social search. Newly launched search engine Topsy (@topsy) aims to take the concept one step further and use social media to index the rest of the web.

Topsy uses social media to find which web pages people are taling about. According to the site:

Topsy doesn’t think the Internet is a collection of documents. Or even a web of documents. Topsy sees the Internet as a stream of conversations.

What this means is that Topsy indexes those links being discussed in social media: “citations of hyperlinks”. These are then ranked according to how many people are posting them and how influential those people are. “Influence” is defined by Topsy’s private algorithm and presumably helps to eliminate spam.

Links are then presented along with a snippet of conversation to give some context. You can drill down into the search results by userid or apply a date filter. The result is an extremely dynamic search engine. Currently Topsy only uses Twitter to create its index however it plans to other social sources.

If this catches on then “retweets” will become even more powerful than they are now. Expect to see “Please RT” a lot more often.