A couple of years ago, someone predicted that Twitter would become "the pulse of society", and I remember thinking something along the lines of "nah, that's not particularly likely, because it's just full of people dispensing pithy one-liners or, more often, moribund observations about the weather." But as keying in status updates across services like Twitter, Facebook, Brightkite and others becomes a habit for millions, there's little doubt that this wealth of data slung online is starting to reflect behaviour, mood, opinion... and, yes, the weather. Against the odds, it's beginning to have some inherent value. You might even find yourself wanting to plough through it all to try and find something.

"Bog off," more uncouth readers might be thinking, "why on earth would I want to get any information from random members of the public keying in tedious stuff from their smartphones on a whim?" But real-time search isn't so much about turning up specific information – although events in Mumbai, Tehran and elsewhere have undoubtedly provided that – it's more about taking temperature; scanning down a list of results and using it to gauge people's feelings about news stories, websites or even Iceland's dubious new Chicken Tikka Lasagne. Of course, it's hard to know the exact demographic of those who post status updates and whether it reflects public opinion generally, but it seems likely to be a more accurate barometer than, say, reading lengthy and vituperative comments on blogs and news sites which are, in the main, bashed out in fury by the same small group of people, week in week out.

Google is the undoubted king of search, but it's yet to gear itself up for real-time results; for example, you need to click through to their advanced search page if you want to specifically look for something that's been added in the last 24 hours. Co-founder Larry Page recently admitted that this was a weakness that they were addressing, but in the meantime there are services launching regularly that aim to compete with Twitter's own slightly temperamental search engine (which itself used to be an independent service called Summize, bought by Twitter about a year ago.)

Tweetmeme and DailyRT combine Twitter search engines with lists of the most popular web links to have been recently tweeted and retweeted, while OneRiot opens that out to other social media sites such as Digg. Topsy and Scoopler provide a simpler, Google-style interface, while Collecta should, in theory, give you what appears to be a real-time update for your search – although it doesn't appear to be working at the moment.

To my shame, my main use for these search engines in the past week has been to gauge what people are thinking about the person I know in the Big Brother house. Pity me. The recent Twitter comedy gig (described as "a chaotic failure" but quite fun in parts) worked nicely on Tweetgrid with the comedians scrolling up the left-hand panel and the crowd reaction in the right (although, predictably, people didn't obey the rules. Because people never do.) Like me, you might be ambivalent about the opinions of random individuals. But a service that distills those opinions into something easily scannable, well, that can verge on interesting. Believe me.