Searchtastic is a new Twitter search engine, currently in beta, that:

* Beat the major search engines in a Twitter search comparison.

* Searches “historical” tweets from months ago. This is significant because Twitter’s own search only includes recent tweets from roughly the last seven days. For example, compare these searches:

Searchtastic: Michael Jackson rushed to hospital

Twitter: Michael Jackson rushed to hospital

* Allows searches for a particular user and the people that user follows.1

* Shows popular topics during the last 24 hours in a hash tag cloud. Hash tags, like #followfriday, indicate the topic of a tweet. We derive our hash tag cloud independently of Twitter’s trending topics.

* Features an innovative “click search” interface. Click on any word in the results to add it to the search. Or remove search terms by clicking on words under the search box.

* Provides instant access to the Top 400 users ranked by the number of followers.

New features will be added in the coming weeks. Follow @Searchtastic on Twitter for the latest news.

Searchtastic is a small but nimble start-up that launched in October 2009. The company was founded by Michael Frantz who is a database expert with twenty years of experience consulting for banks and Fortune 500 companies. Please contact us with feedback, media inquiries, or business development inquiries.

1 The “Search Followed Users” option will be slow on the initial search. Subsequent searches should be faster once the data is cached locally.

Source: Searchtastic