2. People Search Skills
Twitter search also allows you to catch up on tweets from your favorite people. On Twitter, a person's username on the service appears with the @ symbol in front of it. It's usually more effective to search for someone using a Twitter handle than using the person's actual name (sometimes those two items are conveniently the same, however).
Twitter's people search lets you search for tweets from a person, to a person, or referencing a person. When you use the search bars in the advanced search feature, you don't need to put the @ sign in front of the person's name.
A Tweet "to" a person will be accounted for if someone mentioned that person's name as the very first word of their message. A mere "reference" means the name could appear anywhere in the tweet.
People Shortcuts
Here are some shortcuts if you want to get similar functions from people search from the main Twitter search bar.
Type: @lancearmstrong. Twitter will search for: tweets referencing Lance Armstrong Twitter handle.
Type: from:lancearmstrong. Twitter will search for: tweets from Lance Armstrong.
Type: to:lancearmstrong. Twitter will search for: all tweets directed at LanceArmstrong (messages that put his name at the front of the tweet).
3. Zero in on a Location (Places)
The Twitter audience is global, so sometimes it's helpful to know who tweeted a certain topic in your geographic area. You can type in a location such as "Boston" and then search as far away as a thousand miles or as close as one mile. This information is gleaned from the geographic information that people feed into their Twitter profiles.
Shortcut location search
Want to see what's happening from local area Twitter users?
Type: "giants game" near "San Francisco." Twitter will search for: people in the San Francisco area who are tweeting about the Giants game.
Type: near:Boston within:10 miles. Twitter will search for: all tweets done within 10 miles of Boston.
4. Utilize Dates in Search
This is especially important within the Twitter community, because people post so many short messages during the course of their Twitter lives. Knowing that you wanted to reread a Tweet you sent yesterday can help narrow your search substantially compared to sieving through months of messages. When you click on the date bar, a simple drop down menu appears for you to select the dates in which you'd like to search for a message.
5. Search Shared Links
While Twitter is not a social bookmarking service, sharing links is definitely one of the most popular activities. People share links to articles, new products or websites, and people "retweet" links too (meaning, they share again, with their own followers).
This can be especially helpful if you remember a Twitter friend sharing a link with you from a previous day. If you forgot to bookmark it, you could go to Twitter and type that person's name into the "people" search, a key term into the keywords search, and check the link box to say you only want to return a tweet where the link was included. Add the aforementioned date search (if you remember) and you'll improve your chances of finding it.
6. Use Attitudes in Search
One of the more interesting features that Twitter searchers can tap into falls under the "attitudes" section. You can search for tweets that appear negative or positive in tone. This one is especially helpful for looking at product reviews.
So if you type iPhone into the search field, and check off the tweet "negative in tone," you might see a tweet that says, "New York Times iPhone app crashes EVERY SINGLE TIME I try to open an article."
Shortcut: If you want to check attitudes without visiting the advanced search page, simply put a :) or a :( after the search term. So, for positive iPhone reviews, type: iPhone :)
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