Apparently it’s real-time search engine day here at ResearchBuzz. Unlike Collecta, CrowdEye is focused exclusively on Twitter, but like
Collecta it’s in beta. CrowdEye is available at http://www.crowdeye.com/home.aspx.

If CrowdEye just did a Twitter search and returned a result list I would go “Plllbbbt,” and crawl back under my desk to my peanut butter sandwich. But actually I like what’s happening here. Run a search and you get not only results but a graph of how that search term appeared over the last x hours (you can graph as few as the last 12 hours or as many as the last 3 days), a tag cloud of related terms, a list of popular links, and list of popular hash tags.

Each bar in the graph is clickable, so if you want to narrow your results to a particular time span you can. When you click on a single bar to narrow your search results, everything changes — the related tag clouds, popular links, search result — everything. I did a search for Michael Jackson across a three-day time period and clicked through the bars on the chart one by one.

CrowdEye

It was fascinating to watch the keywords change as different things happened. The Staples funeral announcement, the video rehearsal, the will details, and so forth.

Even a search that wasn’t as news-oriented and didn’t have nearly as many tweets associated with it — something like NASA — has a fairly dynamic related term cloud over time as news stories are released and resources are linked to.

CrowdEye only covers 36 hours’ worth of tweets — it’s not deep. But it gave me plenty of ways of viewing my search results and, thanks to that related tag cloud, helped me build a search vocabulary for further research on other, deeper search engines. I quite like CrowdEye.