Parlor trick: Buzzzy searches Buzz

U.K. search firm WorkDigital has launched Buzzzy, a search engine for Google's Buzz. You should use it if you want to see what's buzzing on a topic and, for some reason, don't know that Google Buzz already has its own search function.

That may be a little harsh. Buzzzy does give you different, and more configurable, results than Google Buzz's native search engine does. And name notwithstanding, it actually searches more than Buzz.

Buzzzy pulls results from Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as from numerous other sources like Google Reader, Flickr, and LiveJournal. And, unlike Buzz's own search, which orders results in a seemingly random (but probably algorithmically elegant) way, Buzzzy's search results pages put results in roughly chronological order, which makes more sense for a microblog search tool.

WorkDigital, whose eponymous site functions as a job search engine, built Buzzzy because the semantic search technology firm needed an index of Buzz items to layer into its tools, co-founder William Fischer told me in an e-mail. "We believe that it is the semantic layer that we apply to Buzzes where we create value," he wrote.

I hope that WorkDigital does create value with its Buzz indexing tools, since, as a standalone product, a Buzz search engine will be tough to make money from, if only because the company that makes Buzz has a little experience building its own search products.

For comparison's sake, remember Summize, the real-time Twitter search engine that Twitter eventually bought and molded into Twitter Search. That made sense: Twitter wasn't a search company. Google is.