Not only have Twitter bought Summize, but the beleaguered social Internet near-giants have rebranded the site as Twitter Search, and moved it to search.twitter.com.
For the unaware - where have you been all this time? - Summize was a service that let you search Twitter in various ways, and build a feed or Pipe to track a particular topic of conversation. But now I wonder whether, with its clean and uncluttered look Twitter are branding their newly acquired system as a social search engine, thus becoming the Google of social search?
The idea of social search is simple: rather than relying on a computer algorithm to determine the relevance of content to your criteria, you use the conversations people are currently having, index them, query them and pull out the resources that suit you. Rather than getting a simple list of links, you get multiple conversations which you can engage in straight away.
You could easily argue that simply engaging in Twitter itself and ignoring the search capabilities (ie: simply asking a question and waiting for a response from a peer) is social search in action and the results you get back are more reliable because of it, but why not use Twitter Search as a springboard? Why not filter the results you’ve been given by the search engine by getting in touch with the people who put those tweets there in the first place?
