Advanced Twitter Search

Once you know the basics of Summize's twitter search, you might want to try Advanced Search, which offers numerous options for making your searches more accurate and useful.   You can do a lot more with Summize Twitter search than just typing in search terms. With Advanced Search, you can search only for pages with variations of a term, to and from various people and many other variations.

With Advanced Search, you can fine tune your search to the perfect tweets for you:

• Contain ALL the search terms you type in
• Contain at least one of the words you type in
• Does NOT contain specific words you type in
• Return results in a specific language 
• Translate results to English
• Tweets to or from a specific user
• Links sent to or from a specific users
  
• Special query options {?, :), :( #}
• Any combination of the above operators :)

In this post, we will review examples of how to use these advanced search operators. Summize search by default is a "and" search engine. So by default all query terms typed into the search box will be found in the search results. Since that is the default operation, we will not examine that usage here but focus on the new advanced search options.

OR

First, lets look at the "OR" operator. Say we were interested in all tweets mentioning "Obama" or "Clinton" we could issue the following query "obama OR clinton". The Summize query operator "OR" is always uppercase, so the use of "or" is interpreted as just another query term.  Now if you wanted to search for variations of search term groups you could use the parentheses and issue the query ""barack obama" OR "hillary clinton"".

NOT

In this release, we added the operator not "-". For example, say we wanted to see all the tweets referring to Clinton but not Obama, we would issue the following query "clinton -obama". Note that our "NOT" operator is a "-".

Language Options

Language filtering is useful for many queries. Say we want to see all the "clinton" posts in Spanish, select the "Show tweets written in:" drop-down menu and select Spanish. Note that our language filtering is not configured in the query box but via search options on the side of the page or bottom of the page for our iPhone version.

One last note, we added the ability to translate all the tweets to English. We will add more options here as we figure out the right way to do that in the UI.

User Specific Queries

Often you need to find twitters to or from a specific user. To solve that we added in the "to:X" and "from:X" to the query language. Lets look at a couple of examples, say we wanted to see all the tweets sent to Techcrunch our query would look like this "to:techcrunch" or if we wanted to see all the tweets from Techcrunch "from:techcrunch".

One of my favorite features is the ability to use search to see all the links I have suggested to others or that have been suggested to a user. For example, say we wanted to see all the links suggested to "Techcrunch" we would use the "to:" operator get tweets sent to that user and then we add our "filter:links" operator - "to:techcrunch filter:links". If we wanted to see the links from Techcrunch we would change the "to:" operator to "from:".

Fun Queries

Summize supports a set of fun queries that allow you to find various expressions not easily found. Add :) or :( to your query and you will find tweets with emotion. Or search for "?" to find questions in tweets, or #word to find specific hashtags, e.g. #haiku.

Combinatorics

We have given specifics of the operators that we support. But the fun part is how you can put them together to get the best results for your needs. Here is a fun query, we want to find tweets to Techcrunch ,that pass on a link, talk about venture capital, have a question, and are happy, "to:techcrunch filter:links ? :) venture capital" So have fun mixing them up and send us feedback.




 

Comments

[Dean]

All looks good guys, as you know I've got search working in Hahlo, just tried out some of the queries above and they all work fine.

I've also got #hashtags auto linked when they appear in tweets.

If I get time I'll definitely throw together an advanced search screen for hahlo to make it easy to build these more advanced queries.

[Paul Stamatiou]

Great stuff guys! I'll have to put some of the more advanced features to use. One thing though - is there a way for example to find tweets that contain "@username" but not at the beginning? I tried using the referencing field as well as the to field. The reason I want to do this is because I see all the @username replies in my replies tab on twitter but I want to find the ones that have @something @me that I miss because Twitter only shows replies if your username is the first one listed. I just want to not show ones where my username is first.. to filter out some of the noise.

[Andrew Clarke]

This one is interesting:
http://ajaxian.com/archives/twistori-telling-a-story-with-tweets-and-scriptaculous

[Fubiz]

The product is excellent. Congrats.

[Sunny]

I'm in awe. The advanced search, the operators and the API are all absolutely gorgeous, very well done.

However, I was trying to build a list of my mario-kart-wii friends codes via the API and couldn't. For that I'd need the ability to search in someone's friends (although it could be done using several calls and twitter's API) and the ability to search using regular expressions. The latter would be oh-so-glorious and could lead to very interesting apps.

Any chance of considering regexps for your future upgrades ? :)

[Justin]

Another vote for regex. I know it'd probably tax the servers a bit, but I don't really think it would be used that often... I just selfishly want to build something using that for Microreviewer. :)