Twitter is a great place to communicate and connect, but the sheer volume of data can sometimes be overwhelming. Fortunately, there are a number of great Twitter search tools available. Here is a brief synopsis of five of them.
The Twitter Search tool is a great place to start. Just type who or what you are looking for in the search box at the top of your Twitter page. You can add most of the same operators you use with a web search engine, such as quotes, OR and -. You can also search by hashtag. To save a search, just click the save search box. To retrieve a search later, use the search dropdown box on the timeline.
Snap Bird comes at searching 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 favorites, tweets that mention you, and direct messages. Snap Bird stands out as one of the best free Twitter tools for searching back more than 10 days, which is the limit on Twitter search.
Summizer is a Twitter search tool for the iPhone with a clean interface. It scans the Twitter stream in real time and automatically updates your saved searches. Summizer uses the same advanced operators as Twitter search, so you can drill down to the data you want. Foreign language tweets are translated and you can share your searches by tweet and email.
TweetSaver allows you to search back through your own tweets. If you open a tweet, you can tag it 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 media sites. The free plan saves the 3200 most recent tweets. If you need more storage than that, premium plans are available, with a discount for tweeting about TweetSaver.
Trendistic lets you search tweets by date and time. Enter your search term, then choose a day within the past week. To refine your search you can click on the time of day. This application is somewhat limited in scope, but if you want to drill down by time of tweet, this is a handy tool to have.
All desktop clients provide some sort of search feature, but not everyone wants to bother with a dashboard. If all you want is a quick search, these are some of the best (and often free) Twitter search tools get the job done.
Discover the many different Twitter applications available at My Twitter Toolbox and learn more about how to use Twitter for better productivity. See more information about how to Twitter effectively and improve your life.