CrowdEye provides real time social search on Twitter

The former head of Microsoft’s search team has created a new search engine, CrowdEye, to help people sort through Twitter and find what’s popular.

Twitter’s trending topics are a helpful place to start if you want to see what people are talking about on the Web. The problem is that there are some many tweets under those trending topics that it is hard to make sense of it all. A popular topic could have hundreds of tweets coming in every few seconds, and that’s just too much data to try to process.

CrowdEye hopes to alleviate this problem. It was just released into beta and has some bugs, but it is a very useful tool for certain situations and should hopefully continue to grow in the coming months. Here is what CrowdEye’s about page has to say about the new service:

By tracking discussions on Twitter, we can help our users find out what’s important to them right now in real time. CrowdEye has created innovative technology to scan through tweets, retweets, twitter links and more. We then provide you with powerful yet easy ways to slice, dice, summarize and categorize the data to answer your questions.

CrowdEye is especially helpful for finding relevant content and context about subjects. For instance, #IranElection has been the top trending top on Twitter for days, but it is filled with so many tweets that it is hard to follow. CrowdEye will show you the most tweeted links on a particular topic over the past 12 hours, day, two days or three days.

In addition, CrowdEye also breaks down hastags like #IranElection into popular topics like Mousavi, fraud, protests, Ahmadinejad, etc. If you want to see popular links and recent tweets under the #IranElection hashtag that mention protests, CrowdEye makes that easy.

Even cooler is that CrowdEye provides unique tags for each topic under a hashtag. Some popular tags for Mousavi are logo, march, rally, opposition, etc. Some Popular tags for Ahmadinejad are Photoshop, rejection, fear, hardliners, diverse, etc.

It gets even better. I can then dial in and find popular links being shared under the #IranElection hashtag that mention Ahmadinejad and Photoshop. The image below shows the most popular links in the past day that talk about the Photoshop controversy surrounding President Ahmadinejad:

Not everything is rosy. The recent tweets are fairly worthless and show no clear weighting right now. The service was just launched in beta and this may improve in the future, but as of right now, it’s not nearly as useful as tracking which links are being shared.

CrowdEye is off to a strong start and could really be a great tool for people trying to make sense of it all on Twitter. The service is a bit rough right now, but it’s still quite useful.