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Twitter is quickly becoming the most important social network out there, if it isn’t already.  There’s always talk about how it’s a great way of finding out breaking news.  The issue is sometimes that can be a bit hard to find until something reaches the top trends list.  Before that happens you’re stuck with using Twitter’s search which isn’t exactly the greatest.

Topsy is here to help help solve that issue.  Topsy is a search engine that only searches tweets.  Unlike Twitter’s search, however, Topsy doesn’t just show you what everyone has been retweeting or just repeating about a topic.  It searches the links posted by Twitter users, and how often they were retweeted.  By counting the links and how often they’re retweeted, Topsy also grades users.  Those who get retweeted often have more influence over the search results than those who retweet more often.  For example, searching for a website such as Gadgetell or Facebook yields Gadgetell and Facebook as the most influential users, respectively.

Topsy can even break down what’s happening in the search result by the hour, day, week, month or all time.  It makes search results much easier.  That way, when you want news of President Obama for example, you can go down to the hour, and right now see that lots of people are interested in Michelle Obama’s TED talk.  It all seems like an interesting idea.  Topsy won’t be replacing Google anytime soon, but it could prove much more useful than Twitter’s search engine for finding out what’s going on in the current hot social network.

Read [TechCrunch]