Searching through Twitter

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By Simon Goudie ⋅ August 9, 2008 ⋅ Email this post ⋅ Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

When the Fail Whale stays away, the microblogging tool Twitter is a great way to see what is currently on the minds and in the conversations of people online. As with any great source of information, the ability to search and retrieve data is the key to using it to its potential and Twitter is no different.

With Twitter’s acquisition of Summize, there is now great search built right in. You can find it here and as you would expect, it is a fairly straightforward tool to use: just enter your keywords and hit search to find recent tweets that match you criteria. There are a few other features, however, that may not be so obvious.

Once your search is complete, the results will continue to update, so look at the top of the page to check how many additional results are now available. As things move very quickly on Twitter, your initial search results get old very quickly. Simply refreshing the page should show these new results. Additionally, a lot of the traffic on Twitter is not in English, so rather then filter out these results, make sure you try the Translate button on the right side of the page to see what everyone else has to say. As with all machine translations, it can be a bit hit and miss, but you should be able to get the idea. If it is a real mess, then you can use the dropdown menu to filter by language.

The advanced search link opens up a lot of ways to tweak your search. Some features here that are unique to Twitter include specifying who the tweet was to or from, the location of the tweeter and the attitude of the tweeter, with this being judged by the use of a smiley : ) or frowny : ( face in the tweet. Specifying a question will search for tweets containing questions marks.

The two other tools on the site are both short lists of search terms. The first is the Trending topics, which shows some of the hot topics on Twitter at the moment. The other list is Nifty queries and features a few search ideas that may yield interesting results. Give them a try or create your own, there’s a lot of conversation happening out there!