Twitter is all the rage these days, so much so that even politicians are tweeting. There are more people searching Twitter for ‘news’ events, granted that those stories are 140 characters max, and not backed up with any sources, etc. The bottom line is that Twitter is growing as an info source.
If you’re a researcher that now also uses Twitter as a reference, or perhaps just a Twitter-junkie, you’ll probably find this hack very useful.
Essentially you can integrate the latest Twitter results along with your Google search results. I found the best method for doing so was to use a Greasemonkey script in Mozilla Firefox. Greasemonkey is an extension that lets you install any of thousands of community-generated scripts to tweak the way that Firefox and web sites/pages works.
Impressively, I found quite a few different Greasemonkey scripts (you can find dozens at userscripts.org) that would do the trick. I’ll highlight 3 of them, one of which I liked the most.
The first script from MT-Hacks inserts the most recent 5 Tweets above your Google search results (SERPs). Nice.
The 2nd from facesaerch does the same as the MT-Hacks script, except it includes the Twitter user’s profile pic.
The 3rd script and the one I liked best was from Pete @ Designalism and it places the most recent 10 Tweets to the side of the Google SERPs. I like this, b/c I don’t need to pay attention to the Twitter results if the search is not a timely one that requires near real-time results.
Disabling this script is as simple as clicking on the Greasemonkey icon, heading into the script list and disabling.
