The other day I came across someone tweeting about a site called Topsy.com which is calling itself “a search engine powered by tweets” and it’s pretty cool. Unlike twitter search, when you search for something on topsy it is going to show you results as webpages, not tweets.

Topsy listens to the conversations taking place all the time on the living, social web. This is the rapidly growing, exciting world of Twitter, Blogs, Flickr, Digg, Yelp, Identica and many other communities. People use these communities to share reviews, opinions, messages, comments and discussions about things. Topsy indexes those things. Topsy indexes what people are talking about. The first index is based exclusively on Twitter statuses and the wonderful people who write them.

This is what a typical search page on Topsy looks like. You see the website and underneath in the speech bubble are the number of times that link has been tweeted. On the right hand side you can see the twitter users who tweet about this topic the most, and on the left side you can narrow down your search down to the last hour!

Another really useful way to use Topsy is to find out more information about people on twitter. Topsy has a page for every person it listens to. Tracking all the links that person tweets.

I was surprised when I looked up my twitter name. Topsy had determined that I was “highly influential” and had already added tags to my tweets.

And if that wasn’t enough to blow your socks off, take a look at this. Topsy has “trackback” pages for everything in its index, showing what everyone is saying about that thing.

I am not sure if Topsy can see who tweets what links if they are bit.ly or tinyurl links, because if it can, then this is a much better way to track the reach of a tweet or a link on twitter, regardless of what url shortening service people are using.

So that’s Topsy. Let me know what you think about it.