Using search operators will certainly increase your efficiency and will allow you to reach your piece of information without having to weed through hundreds of useless terms.
| 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”. |
Those are the basic operators but there are some far more useful ones on Twitter.
Attitude Search:
By adding a :), :( or ? you can search for positive or negative tweets on Twitter or those who are asking a question about something. These searches are very useful when looking for people’s views and reactions about an issue, product, movie or a service.
| 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 |
Who & to Whom?
You can use the form, to, and @ to limit your searches based on the tweeps that you want to search for, or you can add ‘#’ to search for a specific hashtag.
| #haiku | containing the hashtag “haiku”. |
| from:alexiskold | sent from person “alexiskold”. |
| to:techcrunch | sent to person “techcrunch”. |
| @mashable | referencing person “mashable”. |
Time & Place:
Twitter has been absolutely vital in following citizen journalists and news coming from a specific location so naturally searching for tweets in a specific area is very handy. Also, now you can see what is trending in a specific area by clicking the trends drop down menu on the Twitter homepage.
| “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:2009-10-22 | containing “superhero” and sent since date “2009-10-22″ (year-month-day). |
| ftw until:2009-10-22 | containing “ftw” and sent up to date “2009-10-22″. |
Links & Sources:
There is only so much that you can say in a 140 characters, hence people like to share links of news, articles, opinions, services and practically anything else. Consequently, a good chunk of the value that comes from Twitter stems from the links it circulates. Therefore, to filter out only those tweets that contain link,s be sure to use the “filter:links” operator, while the “source:” operator will allow you to view tweets sent from a certain platform which might be limited in use.
| hilarious filter:links | containing “hilarious” and linking to URLs. |
| news source:twitterfeed | containing “news” and entered via TwitterFeed |
Hope that you have found this information helpful.
