Twitter is a great place to communicate and connect, but the sheer volume of data can sometimes be overwhelming. Fortunately, there are plenty of great Twitter search tools available. Here is a brief synopsis of five of them.
Twitter’s search tool is a great place to start. Just type who or what you’re looking for in the search box at the top of your Twitter page. You can add most of the same operators that you use with a web search engine, such as quotes, OR, and -. You can also search by hashtag. To save a search, simply click the Save Search box. To retrieve a search later, use the search dropdown box on the timeline.
Snap Bird comes at you from a slightly different perspective. You can’t access the public timeline, but you can search any user’s tweet stream, as well as their favourites, tweets that mention you, and direct messages. Snap Bird stands out as one of the best free Twitter tools for searching more than 10 days, which is the Twitter search limit.
Summizer is a Twitter search tool for iPhone with a clean interface. Scan the Twitter stream in real time and automatically update your saved searches. Summizer uses the same advanced operators as Twitter search, so you can drill down to the data you want. Tweets in foreign languages are translated and you can share your searches via tweet and email.
TweetSaver allows you to search backwards through your own tweets. If you open a tweet, you can tag or share it. Tags appear in a tag cloud, so you can further refine your search. Click the Share button and increase your productivity by sending the tweet to one of your social networking sites. The free plan saves the most recent 3,200 tweets. If you need more storage than that, there are premium plans available, with a discount for tweeting on TweetSaver.
Trendistic allows you to search for tweets by date and time. Enter your search term, then choose a day within the last week. To refine your search, you can click on the time of day. This app is somewhat limited in scope, but if you want to dig deeper into tweet time, this is a useful tool to have.
All desktop clients provide some form of search functionality, but not everyone wants to bother with a dashboard. If all you want is a quick search, here are some of the best (and often free) Twitter search tools that get the job done.