Topsy – A search engine powered by tweets

Topsy is a new kind of search engine, with a new way of looking at the Internet. 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.

Topsy results are the things people link to, when they’re talking about your search terms. Topsy ranks results based on how well they match your search terms, and the influence of the people talking about them.

Topsy uses this same idea, but instead scours social networks such as Twitter, blogs, Flickr and Digg and assigns influence to users on those sites, say through retweets or blog comments.

When one Twitter user retweets another, it acts as a vote of confidence for the latter user.

When users search Topsy, tweets or links by the most influential users will appear at the top of the page, with options for filtering out results for the past hour, day, week or month.

Rishab Ghosh, Topsy co-founder, said:

Topsy relies heavily on Twitter. Twitter revealed plans last month to index the millions of links passing through its website with results based on user influence but has yet to roll-out the service.