Twitter Tip: How to Use Google to Search Specific Twitterstreams
Written by Derek Edmond on March 18th, 2009Yesterday I wanted to forward a link to someone that Chris Winfield posted on Twitter. I knew I “retweeted” the update some time ago but after clicking through a few pages of my Twitterstream to find that retweet, I also knew there had to be a better way to do this.
About Twitter’s Search Functionaluty
Twitter recently added the capability of searching directly from your profile in addition to Twitter’s own search engine. However, for popular keywords, you may need to dig through a long list of results from multiple Twitterstreams.
I was searching “RT @chriswinfield” but unfortunately (for me, not Chris) he get’s retweeted quite a bit 
Enter Google Search
Since I could not remember the specific words other than “RT @chriswinfield”, I turned to Google for assistance. If you know the Twitter username, you can use Google to search a specific person’s Twitterstream for particular status update.
Simply search for a specific keyword/s and add the site operator, “site:twitter.com/USERNAME” to the end of the search query.
In this case, the specific search query was ‘RT @chriswinfield site:twitter.com/DerekEdmond’
Marketers familiar with SEO know that the “site:” search operator shows pages of a domain indexed by the search engine. However there are many that do not consider how the “site:” command may also streamline online research by domain. In this case, instead of searching the entire public timeline I’ve refined the query to a specific person’s Twitterstream.
So in the future, if you ever want to find a Twitter update from a particular person, Google search may be beneficial, especially if the update was not very recent. Hopefully this tip was helpful and I welcome your thoughts and comments.
Update: Thanks to Kid_Disco for identifying how using Twitter’s own advanced search functions could have worked as well. Should have been more obvious but I guess it is a good example of how we often can overlook any engine’s advanced search function.
Great tip Derek!
March 18th, 2009 at 4:52 pmCoulda just done a twitter search for:
from:DerekEdmond RT @chriswinfield
March 18th, 2009 at 4:59 pm@Chris – Thanks very much!
March 18th, 2009 at 6:17 pm@kid disco – Fair point indeed and my mistake for not considering the search operators specific to Twitter. I guess I have too much Google on the brain
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January 1st, 2010 at 6:43 pm