This absence was far too long, and we’ve all certainly felt it. Not only is it back, but it’s back and improved. Now when you misspell names when searching, it will attempt to correct you. That’s on top of it being faster and more relevant. Here’s the full announcement, but there’s not much else to say about it. Click “Find People” at the top of your Twitter window or head here to search for users.

From the graphic above, you can see they’ve added some info from each user’s biography to the search results to make it easier to discern who you’re looking for. You’ll also find it much easier to follow with the inclusion of a follow button for each result.

TweetLater, the tweet-scheduling Twitter service that also brought users the ability to auto-follow and auto-welcome new followers, has released two new features this week in an attempt to help users better manage their accounts.

Keyword Monitoring Made Easy

Though keyword tracking via IM was one of Twitter’s most popular features back when it was available, there haven’t been many good solutions for staying on top of microblogging keyword searches lately, unless you’re pulling RSS feeds based on Twitter Search queries. Dewald Pretorius, creator of TweetLater, decided that he’s tired of waiting for track to come back to Twitter and has developed his own version of the service as an added feature inside TweetLater.

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If you’ve ever wanted to search for something on Twitter, you likely went to search.twitter.com. That’s all well and good if you’re only looking to search on one source. What happens when you want to aggregate results from Twitter, Upcoming, Pownce, Delicious, Flickr and 12seconds? You use Social Mention.

Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and micro-blogging services.

These searches happen in real time. One query returned a result that happened less than 3 minutes ago. This service is powerful and relatively fast, given the breadth of sources it uses. I first came across it last week in the midst of getting hammered from its Mashable mention, but today it’s much more responsive. There’s also a “Hot Conversations” section showing users what’s buzzing right now.

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