Search Twitter Like ‘Sherlock Holmes’

Ankit Kanna
Aug 22, 2017 · 3 min read

With 500 million Tweets every single day, there is a lot of information around any topic and especially when you are looking for something specific.

Let’s take a situation where your Manager has told you to gather all the information regarding tweets sent by users within the 10-mile radius of New York from their iPhone within half hour.

It will take more than a usual search for you to find that type of information within a short period of time, so what do you do?

You create a program taking help from your developer, which uses multiple Twitter search operations to verify and then generate the result.

JUST KIDDING, you should have seen your face. 😃

Coming back to the question how will you do it?

Well, Twitter has an advanced search setup in his programming which will help to search your data within minutes.

We will learn special search tricks that will minimize your effort and help you become “Sherlock Holmes” of Twitter search.

So Sherlock, let’s get started.

Without wasting any time. Here is a list to search Twitter like a pro.

from:BarackObama

All tweets sent by a particular Twitter user, instead of Barack Obama write the username you want to search.

to:BarackObama -filter:links

Tweets sent to @BarackObama but not containing any links, you can use different filter according to your search.

elections list:TIME/time-staff

Search for tweets from users who belong to a particular Twitter list.

youtube.com min_faves:100

Tweets containing YouTube videos that are favorited by at least 100 users, you can use different links other than just YouTube.

earthquake min_retweets:10

Tweets that have been retweeted at least 10 times.

iPhone near:NY within:10mi

Tweets sent by users within the 10-mile radius of New York containing iPhone. Here is how you would have saved your time. Twitter supports some major telephone companies and you can utilize that in your search.

#foodrecipe lang:en

Tweets sent in particular language (en = English). Also, you can go with any other language.

iPhone Reviews since:2016–04–01 until:2016–04–09

Tweets sent in a particular time range (may not work with Twitter APIs). You can edit the time range according to your search.

YouTube good OR amazing OR awesome filter:links

Tweets containing YouTube videos that are described as awesome or amazing. You can test this with funny or any particular keyword of your industry.

#Emmys filter:images

Show tweets for a particular hashtag but containing images. You can use this for video or link too.

Barack Obama filter:news

Show only tweets that mention a keyword and contain links to news websites

from:john to:peter -RT

Tweets from user @John that @mention user @Peter but exclude Retweets. If you want to include retweets just remove -RT from the code.

family games filter: safe

Filter tweets containing adult or potentially sensitive content.

tornado filter:media

Show tornado tweets containing images or videos, again you can do an image search by replacing media with image or video.

music concert filter:native_video

Show tweets that contain native video (uploaded inside tweet)

Hope you learned something new. If you did don’t forget to SHARE it with your loved ones and hit that LIKE button.

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