Topsy is a new social search engine that provides search results on a topic based on the influence of how much people are talking about it. That influence is measured by how many times people have tweeted, that person’s messages, as well as the number of people who follow or read the person’s posts. In other words, websites who have their messages forwarded the most have the most influence.

The search service is built on the back of Twitter’s API and combines information like retweets, and general user influence to produce relatively accurate search results. Topsy also aggregates links to outside pages from Twitter that have been garbled with URL shorteners that have become popular on Twitter.

• http://topsy.com/