Want Twitter Results When You Search Google? – Try Out This Greasemonkey Add-On

I’ve become quite the Twitter addict in the past few weeks, and have enjoyed reading posts by people with similar interests. My initial privacy-related fears about using Twitter turned out to be unfounded, and it has been a great way to find interesting news stories, videos, and websites.

Last night a tweet came across my wire from Ezine articles describing a technique whereby Firefox users can get Google to display search results from Twitter whenever you do a standard Google search – it’s a great little tool, so I thought I’d help spread the word.

All you need to do to use this feature is follow these steps:

1. Download and install the Greasemonkey Add-On for Firefox. You can find this here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748. Greasemonkey allows you to install additional add-ons that allow you to use Javascript to alter the way a given webpage is displayed.

2. Download and install the Twitter Search Results on Google Script for Greasemonkey from this site: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/43451.

That’s all there is to it – simple and easy, and the resulting search result screen in Google will look like this (click image for a larger view):

While you’re at it, if you want one more useful Twitter add-on for Greasemonkey, check out Troys Twitter Script. With this script you can get “Nested Replies, Custom Search Tabs, Autocomplete, Pagination, RT button, Media Embed, URL Expansion, Hash Tag Search Links, and Social Links” on your Twitter page. I’ve found it to be really useful, particularly the media embed function and URL expansion features (the latter reads shortened URLs and converts them into a description of where the URL will take you).