Let’s look at how to search Twitter properly:

Use Twitter (advanced) search

Actually, Twitter advanced search feature is really unique and should not be taken lightly. Among pretty traditional options (exact match, language based, etc), there are quite innovative parameters: search by emotional coloring or sentence semantic structure.

Let’s overview briefly what we can do with Twitter search:

Word-level search

• search for exact match: e.g. ["social marketing"];
• search for any of these words: e.g. [social OR marketing];
• exclude any word: e.g. [social marketing -seo];
• search for related discussions (hashtags): [#seo];
• restrict search results to any specific language (adds “&lang=” to the query string).

Person-related search

• find threads by a specified Twitter user: [seo from:drpixel_be];
• find threads addressed to a specified Twitter user: [Enterprise 2.0 to:laurentkinet];
• find Tweets referencing the specified username: [search @Semetis].

Location-specific search

• find Tweets sent near the specified location: [seo near:bruxelles];
• Date-specific search: find posts sent since / until the specified date (YYYY-MM-DD): [seo since:2008-06-25].

Emotional color and semantic structure search

• finds Tweets with positive / negative attitude: [apple ], [pc ];
• Search for useful resources – i.e. links to related pages: [seo filter:links].

Use Twitter Search Tools

• Hashtags.org
  (as the name suggests) keeps track of all twittered hashtags (#);
• Tweet Scan
  is a simple Twitter search tool (updates results every second).