A few days ago Google announced that they rolled out a new search feature that allows you to search Twitter's database of Tweets on a time line . This is yet another area of growth for Google's rapid advancement into real-time search, meaning Google wants to show you not just what's most popular and/or relevant to your search query, but what people may be saying about it right now.
I think the Twitter search is going to serve as a interesting database of knowledge to capture snapshots of discussion over time. For instance, if I want to see what people were talking about hour by hour during the NCAA men's basketball finals last month, I can do the search and see the results with a showing when the most activity occurred. It allows me to zoom into the hour I choose. It's pretty interesting. Here's a look:
How To Use This For Your Business
In the near future you're going to be able to see everything that's been Tweeted since the first Tweet on March 21, 2006. What that means is that even if you're late to the social media game and haven't been paying attention to the conversations about your business, industry, products, or services, you're now going to get to go back in time to see if someone mentioned you anytime over the last four years.
The opportunity here is for all of us to begin using this tool as a way to get caught up on anything we may have missed or if we were ever curious about what was being said during a particular conference, event, product launch, trade show, etc. We can now go back and check it all out courtesy of Google and Twitter.
Monitoring what's being said in real time is an increasingly important facet of business. Now, you get a chance to catch up a bit even if you're just getting started.