Despite the fact that it is made first and foremost for fun, you can find a lot of interesting information on Twitter. But the only search offered by Twitter is for names and locations. Here are 3 great ways to search Twitter.

At first I thought Twitter was a really bad idea: Instant access to a lot of useless information. But it is actually a lot of fun and has some real life applications.

I sometimes lurk on Twitter’s public time line, amazed to have a glimpse of the lives of people all around the globe and what they are doing right now. But in addition to being fascinating, it’s confusing and very, very fragmented.

With these search tools, you can single out the topics you are interested in. Then you can follow Twitter activity for your topic — live.

Twitscoop

Paris based Twitscoop sports a live tag cloud showing what’s hot on Twitter right now.

As you watch, a word grows to indicate higher activity for that particular term. New words appear others disappear. Click on a term to see a live stream of tweets featuring the word in question.

You can also type in a query. The search results are not live, but are updated every 20 second. The results are displayed in the right margin, which is too narrow to display enough info for my need. If you click one of the results, you will see entire tweet, but this takes you away from the search results.

In addition to the tag cloud and the search box, the front page also contains a list of “hot trends”, 10 words that have been popular on Twitter lately. Pointing your mouse to a word brings a pop-up with a chart showing popularity over time.

At present, there is no RSS available.

Monitter

Monitter is a Twitter monitor that lets you monitor Twitter activity in your browser. It is inspired by the Twitter client TweetDeck and buzz engine Popurls.

You can search for and follow tweets for three search phrases at once. As more people share information relevant to your queries, the view changes. It’s easy to follow the development and definitely addictive.

Monitter also lets you filer tweets by language. Right now, those languages are English, Spanish, and German.

Each search has an RSS feed.

Summize

Summize is another way to search Twitter in real time.

With Summize, you can search for a topic like the iPhone or Iran’s nuclear program. There are plenty of buzz options here for anyone interested in anything: Politics, music, sports… And when there’s breaking news, this will be a great way to stay on top of it.

You can choose to show results in any language or to extract tweets in Arabic, Dutch, Danish, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Thai.

Update: It was announced today that Summize is acquired by Twitter. There are plans to use Summize to offer better search on Twitter.com.

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