Twitter search gets a little more powerful | Social Signal

We missed this last week when ReadWriteWeb reported it, but maybe you did, too. So here's something we've just discovered.

A small but very handy change at Twitter's search engine, search.twitter.com, means it now peeks inside the expanded versions of web addresses shortened using services like bit.ly and TinyURL.

The implications for you? Here are two:

• Searching using your site's domain as a keyword (e.g. "socialsignal.com") will now turn up tweets that linked to you but used a shortened URL. In the past, you had to rely on services like BackTweets or Ubervu to find shortened links to your site; otherwise, they'd be hidden behind a short, random series of characters.
• You'll now also find links that have keywords embedded in the address - which means it's now even more useful for content-management systems to generate SEO-friendly (and human-readable) URLs.

Handy, no?