Three Twitter Searches You Didn’t Think Were Possible
Let’s face it, Twitter is all about search. Real time search. Why else would they redesign their home page to show off their search functionality? The amount of real-time information pulsing through their service at any given minute is impressive, to say the least.
But for all that, Twitter’s built-in search is a frustratingly limited tool, providing access to a very limited amount of the data set available via the web site or their API.
Enter TweepSearch, a search application built by Damon Cortesi that allows you to search through the profile information of over 10 million unique accounts.
Here are three things you can do with TweepSearch that you can’t do with Twitter Search:
Search By Profession
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could find other marketers on Twitter? Other journalists? Other social media experts? Well it turns out that you can, at least as far as people volunteer their professions in their profile.
Searching for “journalist” on Tweepsearch yields, at the time I write this, 16,099 people you could potentially follow. “Marketer” pulls in 89,061.
These are all people who have added the term “Journalist” or “Marketer” somewhere in their Twitter bio information. You’re not going to get everyone of course, but then again, you’re probably not going to follow 16,000 people, either.
Search by URL
Let’s take the “profession” trick one step further; what if you wanted to find out who, on twitter, is associated with a certain business URL.
It’s a bit of a hack because TweepSearch won’t independently search the URL field, so if someone types a URL into their “bio” field, it will also show up too. That said, it works pretty well.
Say you want to know who on Twitter is associated with the game Spymaster. A good start would be to search for people who list playspymaster.com as their profile URL. Type:
www.playspymaster.com
into TweepSearch, and you’ll see a list of 22 results. Easy enough to comb through and pluck the real ones from the list.
Search within someone’s friends
Another cool trick you can pull with TweepSearch is to search within the bios of someone’s friends only. For example, if we wanted to see how many of Robert Scoble’s friends mention Rackspace in their bio, we’d type the following into the search box:
@scobleizer rackspace only:friends
This particular search turns up 69 friends. I Guess Scoble is popular at the office
There are a number of other cool types of search you can do based on the data Damon has available through TweepSearch. If you’re interested, there’s even a handy help page to walk you through it.
Happy hunting.
Read more at www.twitip.com
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Real-time search is an important 
