One of the great mysteries of Twitter–there are several of ’em–is how incredibly slow it’s been to take the obvious step of making search a key feature. (Without it, Twitter is like the world’s largest, noisiest party, not that that’s bad; with it, it starts to get far more useful.) The problem seemed to get solved last July when the company bought the excellent Summize Twitter search engine. But then it failed to integrate Summize –basically, it stuck it in as a link in the footer, as if you were no more likely to use it than you were to read the privacy policy.

Today, at last, I was greeted with real, truly integrated Twitter search (which Twitter had said it was working on) when I popped into the site to see if anyone had Tweeted me. (I’m @harrymccracken there, incidentally.) It’s reportedly not available to everybody yet, but this is surely a good sign.

It’s pretty straightforward, as search should be. The upper right-hand corner of the page now sports a Trends drop-down list (which shows you hot topics at the moment)  and a search box:

Enter a search query, and results pop right in the Twitter look and feel (until now, they’ve still looked like Summize):

Twitter search, like Twitter itself, is wonderfully real-time–in fact, if you do a search and then pause for a few moments, it may tell you that there are new relevant results since you performed your initial query:

None of this is revolutionary in the least, but it’s fabulous to see it front and center. I bet it’ll have a profound effect on how folks use Twitter, and will probably increase the quality of the conversation, since it’ll be so much easier to track down relevant chatter. I know I’ll be using it a lot more, at least–I knew about the old Summize search all along, but it was always just a teensy bit too much of a hassle to call it up.