You’d think nobody would be more on top of Google+ search than Google, given that Google is mostly known as being the search giant of the web, but Google only just launched a proper search feature for Google+ a couple weeks ago.
Google is still not even offering realtime search via Google.com, let alone Google+, since it lost the Twitter firehose, despite having said that it was actively working to bring realtime search back, with data from Google+ and other sources.
Well, Topsy hasn’t been sitting around waiting, and today they announced its own Google+ search engine, which includes realtime results, as well as video and “expert” results.
“We are proud to be the first search engine to provide comprehensive search over public Google+ posts,” said Topsy Co-Founder & CEO Vipul Ved Prakash. “Beyond the 220 million daily tweets we are currently indexing, with the addition of Google+, we’ve extended our search technology to deeply index and rank long-form social conversations. On Topsy, people can now search Google+ and Twitter for realtime, relevance-ranked results, and businesses can be better informed about what’s important by using our APIs to mine the collective intelligence of posters on both Twitter and Google+.”
The search engine uses Topsy’s own proprietary algorithms, which already powers realtime search for Twitter posts on topsy.com. The company says the algorithm calculates who experts are for specific keywords, terms and links, updating influence graphs “in seconds” based on the attention generated from Google+ and Twitter posts.
The API enables businesses to access historical activity related to keywords or links, realtime influence-ranked measurements, “forward-looking momentum, velocity and peak period metrics,” and stories that are trending on various social networks.