This is the new search widget from Twitter.  It basically allows you to do a custom Twitter search then embed and display that search in a widget on your site.  This one is doing a search on itself — searching for instances of “Twitter Widget”.

There is a TechCrunch writeup about it here.

Last Friday I clicked on Twitter>>Find people>>Search, typed in a name and hit enter. And today it says the same thing it did then:

This feature is temporarily disabled.
Thanks for your patience while we work to restore it.

And there is an image of a bird staring down a bug.  What happened to the fail whale?  Maybe the whale is reserved for main Twitter outages.

Click to Enlarge

Mediacom Communications, my ISP at home, recently decided to pull a fast one by redirecting all typos and searches in the address bar to a search results page of their own making.  This unwanted act is supposedly to “help” customers “find what they are looking for”.  Don’t most modern browsers already default to a major search engine if you happen to enter a typo or do a simple dot com-less search in the address bar?  I bet so.  No configuration needed.

The tech support guy at Mediacom said this move is for all the people who don’t already have this setup.  Exactly what browser do these folks use?  IE 4?

So naturally I chose to opt out.  And the opt out link is conveniently located at the very bottom, small and greyed out.

The whole thing just smacks of greed.  The ads on the right hand side of these results pages can only make Mediacom money, most likely at the expense of an Internet surfer finding relevant content.