Searchtastic: Fine but Not Fantastic

One of the reasons I’m fascinated with search on the Web is the flurry of development into new ways and technologies to do search. Even though Google currently dominates search, start-ups continue to emerge convinced they’ve invented a better mousetrap. The same goes for search on Twitter; while Twitter’s in-house search engine does a fine job, there are lots of start-ups toiling away to come up with even better search, including players such as Twazzup and Scoopler.

A new entrant on the Twitter search scene is Searchtastic, which bills itself as “smart Twitter search”. A more accurate description may be different Twitter search as Searchtastic has some interesting wrinkles but nothing that would lure me away from Twazzup or Scoopler.

Searchtastic’s best feature is the ability to search for the tweets of a particular user, including tweets that are a few weeks or months old – something apparently not possible with Twitter. For example, here is a search for tweets that I made mentioning “Twitter”.

A related feature is being able to search for tweets made by someone’s followers. Here are the results for “Twitter” from my followers.

While these are nice feature, they can’t overcome what I see as Searchtastic biggest weakness: an user interface that leaves a lot to be desired. The biggest criticism is that very little information is displayed after you do a search. To find more results, you need to click through to more pages. In an ideal world, Searchtastic would give you options to skip to particular people or pages.

Searchtastic is currently in beta so maybe its UI will evolve. For now, however, I’m going to stick with Twazzup and Scoopler for full-blown Twitter searches, while using the search feature with Tweetdeck for regular searches.

For more, check out this review on TechCrunch.

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