Twitter has been something of a nightmare for me to search. Maybe I’m just not very good at it but I rarely get good results when trying. It’s one of the reasons I decided archive everything I ever get in my feed & everything I tweet into an Outlook 2010 .PST using TwInbox - just to get some decent search indexing on Twitter content that’s important to me.
One thing I did find useful was when searching Twitter, there are a list of operators that you can use to provide better search targeting. This list is below:
- LINK: Twitter Search Page
https://twitter.com/#!/search-home
| Operator | Finds tweets… |
|---|---|
| twitter search | containing both "twitter" and "search". This is the default operator. |
| "happy hour" | containing the exact phrase "happy hour". |
| love OR hate | containing either "love" or "hate" (or both). |
| beer -root | containing "beer" but not "root". |
| #haiku | containing the hashtag "haiku". |
| from:alexiskold | sent from person "alexiskold". |
| to:techcrunch | sent to person "techcrunch". |
| @mashable | referencing person "mashable". |
| "happy hour" near:"san francisco" | containing the exact phrase "happy hour" and sent near "san francisco". |
| near:NYC within:15mi | sent within 15 miles of "NYC". |
| superhero since:2010-12-27 | containing "superhero" and sent since date "2010-12-27" (year-month-day). |
| ftw until:2010-12-27 | containing "ftw" and sent up to date "2010-12-27". |
| movie -scary 🙂 | containing "movie", but not "scary", and with a positive attitude. |
| flight 😦 | containing "flight" and with a negative attitude. |
| traffic ? | containing "traffic" and asking a question. |
| hilarious filter:links | containing "hilarious" and linking to URLs. |
| news source:twitterfeed | containing "news" and entered via TwitterFeed |
kurtsh
Kurt Shintaku's Blog 