There’s nothing new under the sun, however, search has gotten a lot of attention at SXSW, with hyperlocal trends taking over. Twitter has no break out competitors for the event this year, but we’ve seen a bunch of search related tools taking their slice of the early adopter market. Here’s what we’ve spotted:

Plancast – First launched November last year and was co-founded by Mark Hendrickson, the concept, at first, was pushed through as “Foursquare for the future.”  It changed later on when the site had gotten a hang of their users and discovered that what people actually wanted were event tools.

“The vast majority of plans being shared corresponded to events, especially larger ones, and not the ‘long tail’of more personal affairs,” Hendrickson says. Plancast is now all about discovery of social events, and SXSW is one of those perfect opportunities to demonstrate this.

Plancast relies on social connections, location and interests. Thanks to Facebook Connect and tight integration with Twitter, social connections have been incorporated from the app’s inception. The problem lies on the third so the website was revamped again to emphasize it.

“We’ve developed technology that allows us to surface the plans in our system based on their location and categorization. The new homepage is designed to highlight these capabilities, with a new tab system on the left that lets you choose to view, say, all technology events in San Francisco or all music events in New York,” Hendrickson added.

Plancast as we know it today has developed an approach similar to Twitter, and has a category pages you can subscribe to based on your interest and taste. They want tackle all angles of social discovery.

“Our long-term goal with all of this is to become the go-to events service on the web, with the most comprehensive listings, the most effective signal-to-noise filtering, and the best overall user experience,” said Hendrickson.

Loopt – A company started by Standford drop out Sam Altman, Moutain View, California-based Loopt allows user to find people and places around town. It currently has 5 million users. It’s also taking advantage of Facebook, dubbed as the world’s most popular social graph, in order to know where people are gathering and where they want to go. It also alerts when a contact is nearby, so you’re always kept in the loop.

In addition, the site can also help you on location discovery and recommendations, along with deals. This way, you can save money and get freebies nearby. Loopt partners was reported to have given away free music, tickets to Mexico, and discounted sporting goods.

Groupme – The website was founded by Jared Hercht and Steve Martocci back in 2010. It lets users group text people easily for free as it boasts being a real-life network. You can create a group on a landing page and start adding SXSW people so you can plan your activities. Plus, there’s a lot of fun features to make the event even more enjoyable. No need to worry about a lagging 3G signal for Groupme will take care of your group via SMS.

“Lifechanger…. utterly indispensable…. Whether or not you think you need group texting in your life, you won’t know how you lived without it once you give it a shot.”