The signal to noise ratio on Twitter is terrible ; if you are looking for something in particular, the search feature can be useful or useless depending on how good your search-fu is. . one of them is searching for things I’ve read but didn’t. Similar to the popular google dorks, I hate to have to go through the terrible navigation for advanced search (did you even know it exists?). Here are some search terms you can use to improve your search experience:

Basic advanced search

I often search for the old tweets of someone I liked using keywords, sentences and from:

• some keywords or "a piece of sentence". If you add ", the meaning differs:

  • chess opencv (no "): you want the tweet to contain the words “chess” and “opencv”
  • "new article": you want the tweet to exactly contain the “new article” text

• from:twitter_handle (ex: from:clemkeirua)

Popularity

You can ask for a minimum number of likes, replies or retweets:

• min_faves:250
• min_replies:250
• min_retweets:250

Filters:

Sometimes some extra filters can be handy.

• Only the original post, not the replies: -filter:replies
• Remove the post -filter:links
• english language: lang:en (This is useful when a search term is equivalent to another word in another language.)

Dates:

Sometimes you need to reduce your search area down to a few days, dates query can help. Dates are in the form YYYY-MM-DD:

• until:YYYY-MM-DD
• since:YYYY-MM-DD