Useful Twitter Search Tips and Tricks

Lately I've been using twitter a lot and since I love to dig inside stuffs, I thought to learn what features twitter search gives to its user and I found that twitter search is also powerful and supports some handy search operators similar to google(but less than that of google). Here I will list few of the search techniques that you can employ in twitter.


Twitter's search algorithm is pretty decent and it uses an algorithm that determines the quality of the Tweet by letting users interact with it the way they normally do. Anyway lets see few search techniques that will be useful while using twitter.

a) Exact phrase search: Wrapping your search text with double quotes(eg. "cricket nepal") will let you to search for exact phrase in twitter. Note that the exact phrase search also enlists the tweets with special characters such as #, :, etc.(eg. tweets with #cricket #nepal are also seen while searching as "cricket nepal").

b) Using OR operator: OR operator allows you to search for all the tweets containing either of the keywords. An example search would be like politics OR crime.

c) Exclude tweets with certain keywords: If you want to omit the tweets containing certain words, the minus sign can be used to exclude the tweets containing those keywords. For example, the search cricket -india will exclude the tweets containing the word india(Btw, no offense meant).

d) Tweets from specific user: To view the tweets sent by someone, you can simply use the from keyword. For example, from:techgaun would list all the tweets I've sent.

e) Tweets to specific user: You can also view the tweets sent to the specific user i.e. mentions by using the to keyword. For example, to:techgaun would list all the tweets mentioning me.




f) Location based search: Twitter allows you filter your search based on the location. The near keyword can be combined with your search query which can be used to search for results near us. Example searches are near:dhulikhel and resort near:dhulikhel

g) Location + Range search: We can also search twitter within specific distance from a specific location. The within keyword can be combined with the near keyword for this kind of search. Example search queries are near:kathmandu within:10km and near:kathmandu within:10mi

h) Date based search: We can use the twitter's date based search to narrow down our search. The two keywords since and until can be used for date based search in twitter. To search all the tweets about nepal after february 01, 2012 I would do nepal since:2012-02-01 and to search all the tweets about Nepal before 2012 January, I would do nepal until:2012-01-01. For some reason, the until search does not seem to work, at least for me however twitter help shows this keyword in the list.

i) Searching tweets containing URLs: So you might want to search for the useful URLs other people tweet on the twitter. Twitter allows to do such search by using filter keyword. For example, I could find links about web development by the search query web development filter:links.

j) Searching questions: You can use twitter search to find the tweets that are questions. THe ? keyword is used for this purpose. An example search query is social media ? which would result in the tweets containing questions related to social media.

You can combine one or other search techniques to narrow down your search. Also, the advanced twitter search is available HERE. I hope this information becomes useful for you. :)