Buried deep in the bowels of Twitter.com is a really neat tool for doing advanced searches. You just have to know where to look. Because for some odd reason, Twitter doesn’t make it easy to find. When I learned that someone who I consider pretty web-savvy didn’t know about the advanced search, I figured I’d better share.
No further suspense, here is the direct link:
https://twitter.com/search-advanced
How to find it on your own
In case you forget the above link, or decide not to bookmark it or this article :) , you can find the advanced search on your own with a little perseverance and the following hack:
- Type anything (literally anything, gibberish will do) into the standard Twitter.com search field.
- From the results page, click on the “More options” menu.
- Choose “Advanced search”, the very very last link in this menu.
- Send a tweet @twitter to ask them why they buried this so deep (optional).
See how easy that was? :|
What you can do with this neat search tool
There is no way to save tweets or archive them unless you’ve copied the links or embedded them somewhere. Over time, they become buried even deeper than the Advanced Twitter search. Ever take a poll and want to refer back to the answers months later? Ever think, “Oh yeah, I saw something on Twitter about that. Now what was it…”?
The Advanced Twitter search let’s you search tweets with a wide selection of criteria, making it pretty easy to find what you’re looking for if you have just a minimum of information about who published the tweet, words or people that were mentioned in it, or when it was sent.
A big downside is that the search fields do not retain any of the search criteria you use, so you have to plug them in again with each new search. Clearly Twitter doesn’t want us to actually use this, but it’s pretty awesome and comes in handy from time to time.
You’re welcome :)