Jason Preston (@jasonp107) is the Director New Media at the Parnassus Group, hosts of 140: The Twitter Conference (@140tc)

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.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

By Thomas Baekdal. Follow him @baekdal.

Twitter Search is just amazing because it can give you real-time feedback about pretty much everything. That is, if you know how to look for it. Here is how:

Before we start I need to point out that both TweetDeck and Seesmic (my two favorite Twitter apps - with Seesmic being the #1) allows you to open special search panels, allowing you to “follow” a search term, instead of a person.

This is a great way to keep on top of things.

The Secrets…

1: Get up to speed with all the latest buzz

The primary way that I keep up-to-speed on social networking is to follow a social networking search. For instance, let say you want to get all the new links about social media, not including the many re-tweets that people make.

Simply search for:

“social web” OR “social media” OR “social news” -rt filter:links

2: Find all the people who are not talking about you directly

Another thing you might want to do is to find all the people who talks about you (or your product) but isn’t including you directly. E.g. If I want to find all the people who mention my name, but aren’t replying to me.

Simply search for:

Baekdal -to:baekdal -from:baekdal -@baekdal

Note: You can also find everyone who links to you via BackTweets

3: Get all reactions across multiple twitter profiles

Another thing you might want to do is to get all the replies and mentions that refer to you, across multiple twitter profiles. For instance, I have 7 twitter profiles and I would really like to see everything in one place.

Simply search for:

to:baekdal OR to:baekdalarticles OR to:baekdaldesign OR to:baekdalnotes OR to:baekdal24hours (etc…)

BTW: Seesmic will do this automatically in the reply panel (which is one of the main reason why I prefer it over other Twitter apps).

4: Follow what people are saying about your competitors

You also may want to follow not only what your competitors are saying on Twitter, but also how people respond to them. All you need to do is to simply search for:

from:competitor OR from:competitor

E.g. If your competitor is H&M (@handm), you can search for

from:handm OR to:handm

5: Only follow links from certain people

One of the problem of following people on Twitter is that you don’t get to decide what to hear. Sometimes you just want to know about the links that they share, and not hear all the chit-chat.

Let’s say that you only want to see the links that I share, then you simply search from:

from:baekdal filter:links

6: Only get the new info about a topic

One of the most common way to use Twitter search is to search for hashtags or product names. But the results are very often filled with identical tweets.

So if you want to search for anything about ‘American Airlines’ but without the re-tweeted stuff

“american airlines” -rt -via

7: Find all shared pictures about a topic.

It can be really interesting to see only the pictures that people post about a certain topic or event. During this year’s Le Mans, I was continually following every picture that people tweeted. You do this by simply searching for:

“le mans” twitpic OR yfrog OR post.ly OR twitgoo OR pikchur filter:links

BTW: Another way to search for images is to use Twicsy

Have you figured out any other ways to use Twitter Search that you’d like to share? How about trying these above techniques and letting us know what you think, in the comments?

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

by Chris Allison (@Chris_Allison) CMO of Centsports.

A few days back, for no particular reason, I started thinking more about how to search for useful information on Twitter. Then Twitter announced they were integrating search.twitter.com with the main platform, so the time to learn has never been better. Not only am I interested, but it seems the hive mind has deemed it important as well (you know all this micro-blogging is turning us into a hive mind don’t you?)

The Advanced is Basic

I set out to learn more about the search feature, which is what so many are saying will be where Twitter makes its money, and found all of my advanced theorizing led me to a pretty basic page that held all of the answers. Props to Twitter. If you go to http://search.twitter.com/advanced you can literally see all of the different ways you can search the hive mind.

I’m pretty sure these advanced features aren’t going to be obvious options in the integrated version so it wouldn’t hurt to know how to use these advanced functions by just typing them into the box so you don’t have to revisit these pages every time you want to search. Twitter gives you the information you need to run these searches from your integrated search box at http://search.twitter.com/operators.

The Operators

Instead of detailing every operator you can use, I’ll pick out some of the specifically useful ones you should get comfortable with to make your search experience on Twitter better than it is on Google (that’s right, I said it!) As an aside, Google is a hive mind too, but their data is often collected as a side effect of user action, whereas the majority of Twitter’s “thoughts” are genuinely created and intentionally produced- carrying on.

• Hashtags
• Minus sign
• Near
• Since
• Until

Creating and Searching Niche Subjects using Hash tags

The hash tag is probably the most important function of Twitter search, and the most used. The chances are you probably already use the hash tag (#), but if you don’t here is a brief run down. The hash tag enables Twitter users to create searchable subject groups. Simply by adding a phrase to a tweet a user makes it easier for that tweet to be found in a relevant search. An example would be, “I like Pepsi, but I don’t really like this commercial #superbowlads”. Then anyone can search Twitter for #superbowlads and find this Tweet along with any others tagged the same.

Pro: The power of the hash tag is that it creates very specific sets of content. If you want to know what other people think of the superbowl ad that just came on you can find it much easier by searching for the hash tag than by searching for something similar in a normal search engine.

Con: The downside of the hash tag is that if you’re not an especially active twerson then it’s likely you won’t know the hash tags for all of the subjects you are interested in searching; however, if you stay plugged in you can see the hash tag groups forming right before your eyes- heck, why not create your own!

Making Your Search Clearer using Minus Sign:

The minus sign is very simple, but useful. If you have a search that you know will probably bring up irrelevant results you can filter out the irrelevant results by using the minus sign. The example that Twitter uses is if you search for beer then you might want to include –root, to prevent results about root beer from coming up.

Depending on what you are looking for a search for “beer” probably isn’t a very good search. The power of searching Twitter is plugging into the hive mind and finding real time thoughts and news. Thus, searching Twitter for beer or even “root beer” (quotations tells the search engine to only search for that exact phrase) is a waste of time- you’ll get lots of results like “mmm I could use a beer right now” and “damn that beer was good”. When searching Twitter, try to be as specific as possible, that is where its strength lies. In this scenario try searching for the exact company or type of beer you are interested in.

Finding New Friends using Near:

This is where Twitter really shines. It’s also the beginning of the operators I didn’t know about before exploring Twitter’s advanced function page. The near function lets you search for tweets coming out of a specific area. There are two very powerful applications of this function.

1. Find locals
2. Access the hive mind and see what it’s like to be at an event

I found this particular operator very interesting because I found out there are many more people in my town using Twitter (only about 100,000 people where I live) than I expected. A simple search for near:CollegeStation produced the tweets of many locals. I’ve been thinking about hosting a tweetup, and now that I realize there are more people tweeting out there, maybe I should! One thing to note: don’t put a space after the colon, and if the city name is two words make it one.

The other use of the near function is to see what’s going on at an event, or what it feels like to be there in person. I’ll go into more depth on this a little further down, but suffice to say if you want tweets from people at the inauguration rather than just news from people watching it then adding “near:washingtondc” could be very useful.

Searching Time Periods using Since and Until:

These functions let you narrow down your search to a specific timeline. If Twitter had been around for 9/11 then you might want to search near:NYC since:2001-09-11 until:2001-09-12 if you were looking for local and real time tweets, or add since:2008-01-01 to the search if you were looking for a more broad retrospective view of what people think about the event now. The options for personal interest and scientific research are both wide open with these functions. The hive mind is a powerful a thing.

Putting It All Together:

I hope you’ve enjoyed learning a little more about what you can do with Twitter search. Here is an example of putting it all together using #inauguration, near:collegestation , since:2009-01-20, until:2009-01-20.

You can see the results here.

Note: Twitter’s servers went all crazy eyed when I did this search near Washington DC, my guess is they’re just overloaded. I went ahead and submitted a note via their help form so hopefully they’ll look into it. Either way, the power of the search remains the same; it’s only a matter of Twitter getting their servers more prepared for larger searches; when they do, you’ll be ready.

Happy searching, welcome to the hive mind.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Republishing with RSS

It’s been far too long since I’ve allowed my geeky passion for RSS to spill forth.

As a reminder, let me say again - anything that throws off an RSS feed (oh, and that’s just about any online tool) presents some interesting republishing opportunities.

The republishing of RSS feeds for you own content creation purposes involves two steps 1) locate or generate the RSS feed, 2) produce the code to publish the feed as HTML somewhere.

Some example of RSS producers - blogs, online calenders, blog categories, and custom searches for starters.

So, let’s say you are way keen on all things to do with, I don’t know, referral marketing. You simply go to Google News and create a search for “referral marketing” (use the quotes) and copy the RSS feed URL. You can do the very same at search.twitter.com and capture the RSS feed for all tweets that contain that search term.

Or, let’s say you created a twitter #hashtag for an event, that’s right, a search for said hashtag produces an RSS feed and can be published as streaming content anywhere you can paste the code.

Producing the RSS feeds of course is only half of the equation in the republishing scheme. There are many ways to publish the RSS feeds, but here are two free and simple ways.

1) Widgetbox - simply take the RSS URL to widgetbox and create stylish widgets that can be massaged in many ways. (This tool deserves a full post as you can do some very cool things with widgets and gadgets.)

2) Feedburner - take your RSS URL to Feedburner and use a feature called BuzzBoost to produce the HTML for you - this service gives you full CSS styling capabilities if you care to create your own style.

Here’s an example of a widgetbox widget for the search referral marketing on twitter.

Let your imagination run wild with this one!