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CrowdEye is a new search engine designed exclusively for Twitter, the popular micro blogging service that has recently taken the world by storm. There are many services out there that have sprung up to capitalize on Twitter’s popularity, and it’s clear that the folks at CrowdEye have put a lot of effort into designing their own offering. While the site is still in beta, there are a lot of features here for the avid twitter user. Will CrowdEye become the first place you look to tap into the buzz on Twitter? Read this review to find out.

CrowdEye is designed to help you get a handle on the vast volume of new tweets posted every hour. Of course, Twitter offers its own search engine, but  CrowdEye is designed to offer “Zeitgeist” style functionality, allowing you to view statistics, links, and related keywords with every search. The site itself has a simple and clean Google style front page, with a list of suggested hot topics to save you from having to type them in. Type in any term, and you get a 4-part page of results with an activity graph, popular links section, tag cloud, and a panel of individual tweet results. By clicking on the graph, you can drill down to view tweets by the hour, while the tag cloud offers related keywords. Clearly, CrowdEye doesn’t want you to have to look elsewhere for any information.

In many ways, Twitter search is a tough nut to crack. Most people tend to prefer following specific users and reading all their updates, rather than trying to sort through a list of individual tweet results. However, with Twitter becoming a forum for firsthand accounts of world events, CrowdEye seems like the perfect place to look for uncensored, personal news from around the globe. Following this logic, some current events searches were conducted to put CrowdEye through its paces. The first test case was a search for “Iran”. Since the conflict has died down in Tehran over the past few days, it would be nice to be able to change the timescale on the hour graph. Right now, searches can go back for a maximum of 3 days, however it would be interesting to see how the volume of Iran related tweets has changed over a longer period of time. The ability to expand this timescale is missing from the beta, but hopefully it won’t be from the final version. The popular links section for this search offers five highly relevant news stories and blog articles that a lot of people have been linking to, along with one seemingly irrelevant link to the StumbleUpon home page. Since CrowdEye is in beta, this is probably not the final layout, but it would be nice to be able to see more pages of popular link results. The tag cloud of related keywords seemed mostly spot-on, with Democracy, Ribbon, and Protests among the top results. Finally the tweets themselves were a mixed bag, which is to be expected with the sheer number of tweets out there. It seems that many people have been trying to promote various unrelated websites by tagging them with the word Iran. Unfortunately, with only 140 characters to go on, it’s tough for CrowdEye to only index the relevant results.

Looking at these results, it seemed that a search for a more recent event was in order. Since Twitter is a dynamic and constantly changing clearinghouse for personal updates, the best tweets are usually about the newest news. Another current events search, this time for Urumqi, returned better results. Urumqi is the city in China where recent ethnic violence has broken out, and the Chinese government has been actively suppressing information about the riots there. It is all the more intriguing, then, to see what has made its way through to Twitter. This time the results were much more relevant. Gone were the few spam posts, replaced with many different news stories that offered a better view of the conflict than a reader could get from a single news source. Some users had even posted pictures taken in the region. It is quite possible that some professional reporters are now looking to Twitter for leads on their stories. Based on these results, it’s a potential goldmine of crowd sourced information. However many of the results were duplicates with the same headline and link, posted by different users. When CrowdEye moves out of beta, it would be nice to see some sort of filtering implemented to remove these from the results.

The site itself works very well, and the average user should run into few problems using it. One little glitch, however, is that a search often takes a few seconds to complete. While the delay is understandable, the results page shows a “No data to display.” message, with no indication that anything is loading. It would be easy for new users to think their search had returned no results and click away with the current setup, so it might be a good idea to put up an AJAX style loading graphic instead. Also, layout wise, the bulk of the results appear on the right side of the screen, while the left hand graph and tag cloud contain comparatively little information. One thing that the developers at CrowdEye can do is play around with the layout a bit and consider moving the graph and related keyword cloud to the right. CrowdEye’s layout is clearly modeled after the more Web 2.0 style search engines, but it’s unclear whether users actually find this interface easier to use. Implementing some sort of click tracking would be a cheap (probably free) way to see what users are actually doing on CrowdEye, which would allow the developers to tweak the interface accordingly.

Overall, CrowdEye is definitely worth a look, but it’s still clearly a work in progress. The site needs better filtering of results to increase relevance, and the interface would probably benefit from a few changes. Still, the site is already providing a good set of results for popular topics, which is clearly the goal. Even if you’re not blown away by the beta version, CrowdEye is a site that you should keep an eye on if you’re interested in staying current on Twitter.