With 4-5+ million users, and new accounts added at an estimated 5-10,000 daily, and mentions on traditional media, Twitter (website) seems to have become mainstream. It’s one of those simple internet ideas that has taken on a life of its own. And spawned countless complementary applications.

One such application, Summize, was purchased by Twitter last year and, apparently is soon to be integrated into the Twitter user’s interface. Appropriately renamed Twitter Search, this app is available at http://search.twitter.com.

Twitter Search enables a search of all tweets–not just those of people you follow–in real time based on a keyword or keyword phrase.  Unlike Google, Yahoo! or other search engines, Twitter Search returns relevant tweets based on recency. There is also an advanced search to filter your Twitter search results by names, locations, hashtags (info), attitude, or the inclusion of links.

At any given time, there is bound to be someone tweeting about whatever is going on in the world–whether it’s a sporting event, a television show, an earthquake, or a conference. People are also tweeting opinions, reviews, interesting articles, new product announcements, events, and much, much more. I searched for “twitter search” and found this tweeted 22 minutes prior to my search:

From the searcher’s perspective, the great value of tweets is that they are 100% user generated–it’s the equivalent of word-of-mouth marketing. And since each post is limited to 140 characters, a Twitter Search results page is a very quick read.

I can’t tell you how many searches are conducted on Twitter Search each month because I couldn’t find the data anywhere. But my assumption is that it is growing…and fast. ComScore (website) tracks search engine volume each month, but does not include Twitter Search data. It is unclear if this is due to a low volume on Twitter Search or just a lack of tracking on the part of ComScore.

What we do know is the websites on the low end of the December search volumes were:

• Facebook with 161 million searches
• Amazon properties with 204 million searches
• Craigslist with387 million searches

Time will tell whether Twitter Search will become as mainstream as Twitter itself–or even the traditional search engines. Integration with the user’s Twitter interface should help increase its use exponentially. In the meantime, I’ll continue to add to it’s search volume. How about you?

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