Using Twitter Search more effectively
One of the biggest assets for Twitter is the search and the user generated information that populates the time line is really immense. The best part of Twitter search is that the results are produced in real time unlike the conventional search engines which provide only indexed results. Both Microsoft and Google have been trying to strike search deals with Twitter but that is a whole big story in itself! Most of the query operators like AND, OR, etc which we use in the conventional search engines will work in Twitter search also. Apart from these standard operations there are many other interesting things which you can do with Twitter search.
Search Operators
Twitter has published the whole list of search operators that will pull out valid results when you key in those in the search box. Let us take a look at how you can use some of the operators to get desirable results.
Finding local tweets/tweeps
Building conversations spinning around the local community is one thing that Twitter has enabled. Using the “near:” operator you can find people/tweets that come from the specified location.
Example: If i want to find tweets that are published by people who live in a 20 mile radius from Blacksburg , the query is near:blacksburg within:20mi
Searching for particular terms or events with a location parameter also works.
football near:blacksburg
conference near:blacksburg
Finding jobs/Hiring people
It is hard to find the right people to hire within a particular city and at the same time it is not an easy task to find the right job in the right place. A sample search query “PHP developer” near:”san francisco” pulls out many job postings.
This will also be helpful for freelancers who are looking for projects to work on. The same works well if you are looking to hire someone too.
Conversations/Tweets/ Links
If you are looking for interesting conversations or links to material on a particular topic these search queries will be of good help.
from:ramanujam to:RichardatDell – Lists all the replies that i made to @RichardatDell
from:ramanujam :) – Lists my tweets which had the smiling emoticon
from:ramanujam filter:links – Lists my tweets that had an external link
Save/Subscribe to searches
The Twitter search interface also provides an option for saving search queries. For instance, if you are a web hosting seller providing vps hosting then one good option to find new customers to do a keyword search for ‘vps hosting’. You may also have similar keywords like ‘dedicated hosting’ , ‘managed hosting’ etc. With the “Save this search” option you can create a link to these search queries and check them back whenever you want. Twitter does provide an option to subscribe to the search results in RSS format.
This is also one way to monitor keywords on Twitter but there are many third party tools which will help you to do this in a better way.
Twitter Advanced Search
If you are not the person who likes to experiment with the different query combinations then the Advanced Search is for you.With different keyword based search options, location parameters, attitudes, the advanced search helps to do a targeted search for specific information.
User Scripts/Addons
If you are a Firefox user there are a few options which will help you to use Twitter search in an easier way than others. The Twitter search addon will enable you to look up real time Twitter search results inside the browser.
The Twitter search results userscript (requires Greasemonkey addon) shows real time Twitter search results in Google search pages.
Better Twitter Search Engines
If you are a long time Twitter user then you would definitely know about ‘Summize.com’. Twitter acquired the company in July 2008 and integrated it with the main site. The search tool is definitely a great tool but there are a few other Twitter search engines which will help you to look up things in a better way.
Twazzup is one such website which provides better insights like news, photos etc along with the search results.
Bing tweets is a nice mashup which combines the trending topics in twitter and shows corresponding search results from Bing.
Twibs is a business directory/search engine where in business owners can add their Twitter accounts.
The above three are only examples and there are several other applications built using the Twitter search API.What is your favorite Twitter search application?
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[...] and this will allow users to add location coordinates to their tweets. It will definitely make the twitter search feature rich but more importantly it gives a nice playground for Twitter to experiment location [...]