Twootles -- More Of A Killer Than Cuil

It's been a while since the search engine Cuil touted itself as the "Google Killer," boasting of a more expansive index than the big G. However, by and large Cuil failed to live up to the hype, and it's pretty much avoided my radar. Later on it soon became clear that the future of search would not be won by the search engine with the largest index, but by the one who can bring real-time results.

And guess what -- Twitter has been leaving all the big search engines in the dust since it flitted into the collaborative media scene.

Twitter has the advantage of providing real-time search results, and with millions of Tweeple tweeting around the clock, events around the world show up on search results (and on Twitter's trending topics) almost instantly.

I'm not much of a Twit, but I did happen to check on my mostly-unused Twitter account a few weeks ago -- and saw the power of Twitter's search function at that moment. I was randomly doing searches on certain Hollywood actors, and the query "Nicolas Cage" immediately came up with Tweets, barely a few minutes old, by New Yorkers tweeting about a Ferrari crash in a set of Cage's new movie.

That was the first of two car crashes that occurred during shooting of Cage's upcoming film "The Sorcerer's Apprentice." I quickly turned to the big search engines to look for more news about the crash, but couldn't find any. I did Google searches every fifteen minutes after that, and finally got the first piece of vague news a little over two hours later.

That's the main problem of the bigger search engines -- it takes considerable time from the moment events happen to the moment reporters write up their articles to the moment when Google indexes the resulting web pages. It's no surprise that people are now turning to Twitter first, and Google second, to get real-time news on the 'Net. [It beats waiting for the news to come out on CNBC, too, unless of course Margaret Brennan is on.]

There have been rumors that the big names are out to buy Twitter soon -- Apple for $700 million and Google for $1 billion, for instance -- but apparently some guys beat them to it. Enter Twootles, a search engine that displays Google and Twitter results side-by-side.

I've tried it this morning and was fairly impressed by the interface, but there's still that common Twitter problem -- most of the results you'll get are Tweets by everyday people tweeting their friends. Twitter is, after all, primarily a social media platform, and people still use it to keep in touch with their network much more than to post and keep up with news.

Twootles is still in its beta stages, and its developers are currently working to include new features soon. What features would be good? For me, I'd like to see some filtering in the Twitter results to remove the "fat" and show only the newsworthy Tweets -- I did a search on "Chris Gomez," and while the Engine Alpha site made it to the Google results, most of what I got on Twitter was about Chris Brown and Rihanna. [I'd tell you about the latest news on that too, but that's another story...]

You can try Twootles out for yourself at www.twootles.com.