Recruiting with Topsy.com Search Engine

I was introduced to Topsy.com a short while ago and felt that sharing it with everyone would help to spread the word a another very good tool. Topsy is unique in that it sees the internet as a “stream of conversations.” Unlike traditional search engines that search the web as a “collection” of documents, Topsy.com is driven by tweets feeding off of twitter in real-time.

The tool is certainly not perfect and it has it’s flaws (for the use of recruiters) though it was not designed for recruiters. The key feature for me is its unique search ability and teh fact that it archives tracbacks.

This is significant when researching as it will allow you see the originating tweet to connect with the tweep that you might be interested in. With that it will also archive that conversation for later mining.

Topsy will also support search in mulitple languages including doublebyte. The most popular languages to date are English, German, Japanese and Portuguese.

Take a look at my thoughts and demo below. There is also a cheat sheat of search commands unique to Topsy below.

Topsy’s unique set of search commands

Topsy boasts a unique set of search parameters in regards to search. Though it does not accept full Boolean logic (which is a flaw for recruiters) it does accept basic search parameters that I’ve detailed below. I’ve also detailed these searches within the video for you as well.

Basic Search

term1 term2 term3 (implicit AND between terms)

Exact match

“ryan leary” would return a match for the exact phrase “ryan leary”

And the following ‘advanced syntax’:

From Search

from:<twitter username> – e.g. ‘from:ryanleary recruiting’

Using this search query will limit your results to links about
‘recruiting’ that were posted by the twitter account ‘ryanleary’.

Site / Xray search

site:<domain> – e.g. ’site:techcrunch.com Topsy’

Using this search query will limit your results to links on the TechCrunch site that are about Topsy.

site:<sudomain.domain> – e.g. ’site:eu.techcrunch.com twitter‘

Using this search query will limit your results to links on the EU version of the TechCrunch site that include the term ‘twitter’.