Powerful Tips And Tricks For Excellent Twitter Search

Today Information has no boundaries. All you need to reach this information is an internet connection, to connect to the endless ocean, where every wave carries hell loads of information. Now issue is; we can’t imbibe all this information and hence need some way to filter as per our needs and relevance. Hence to find the right information we need some strong search engines and other applications, portals which help us to overcome this information overload. Today Twitter is one of the most popular applications which get 140 million tweets every day.

Twitter can be used for mind boggling searches if used intelligently. It will help to monitor your company, business, industry; you can find new people and attract new followers. This article will help you to make your Twitter searches more efficient and less time consuming. I have divided this article in three heads; Use Operators for search, Use Advanced search and Save search.

Hope these tips and tricks for powerful Twitter search will help you to search, in an intelligent way, where you can search by tweets, people, videos, images, business, government, music, news, sports etc.

Use Operators for search

Here is a list for existing operators,

Search string	Result	Advance Search Element	When should you use it?(mentioned if not obvious)
BillGates microsoft	Contain both “BillGates” and “Microsoft”	All of these words	Default
“BillGates said”	Contain exact phrase “BillGates said”	This exact Phrase	Use when you are looking for exact phrase and when you exactly know your search phrase.
BillGates or Steve	Contains either “BillGates” or “steve” or both.	Any of these words
1.BillGates –UberFacts 2. BillGates -rt	1.Contains “BillGates” but not “UberFacts” 2. Shows all tweets with BillGates except reTweeted ones.	1.None of these words 2. Include reTweets checkbox.	1. Use when you know, what you surely do not want. 2. handy if you’re searching for a popular term.
#haiku	Contains the hashtag “haiku”	These hashtags
from:BillGates	Sent from person “BillGates”	From these accounts
to:BillGates	sent to person “BillGates”	To these accounts
@DeepakChopra	Refer to person “DeepakChopra”	Mentioning these accounts
“DeepakChopra” near:”NYC”	Contains exact phrase “DeepakChopra” and sent near “NYC”	Near this place
near:NYC within10mi	Sent within 10 miles of “NY”
DeepakChopra Since:2011-02-20	Contains DeppakChopra and sent since 20Feb2011
DeepChopra until:2011-10-20	Contains DeepakChopra and sent up to 20Oct2011.
movie –scary ☺	Contains “movie”, but not scary, and with a positive attitude.	“Positive” Checkbox
Movie romance ☹	Contains “movie” with romance, but a sad one.	“Negative” Checkbox
Rain ?	Contains “rain” and asking a question.	“Question” Checkbox
“romcom movie” filter:links	Contains “romcom movie” exact phrase and linking to URLs.		1 link is worth 100 words. This search has been used wisely with great results.
fire source:txt	Contain “news” and entered via SMS (short message service).		Use when you like to see tweets from a specific twitter client.
Operator combinations e.g.	Desired		Use more than one operator to make your search more precise.

Use Advanced Search

If you have any issues remembering or using specific operators, you can use advanced search. It provides deep search in four categories:

• Words

1. All of these words
2. This exact Phrase
3. Any of these words
4. None of these words
5. These hash-tags
6. Written in (a list-box is provided to choose a language from)

• People

1. From these accounts
2. To these accounts
3. Mentioning these accounts

• Places

1. Near this place

• Others

2. Positive
3. Negative
4. Question
5. Include retweets

In advanced search you will see an entire page of operators. Here you can also select the language of tweet. So you can look for tweets containing a keyword sent by particular person, can search on location, time frame, can do elimination, can classify as per emotions etc. All these will help you to follow relevant people, exact match option will help you in long search phrases which otherwise can pull results for each word.

Save search

You can save up to 25 searches on Twitter. In order to save your search you need to enter the search term you would like to save. Then hit enter, then click on the cog like icon at the top-right of your screen. Hit save button. This will help you to access your search again in the search box by selecting the drop-down menus that will be populated after clicking save.

This may not be the end of making your Twitter search powerful, but this is the beginning for sure.