Searching Twitter

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So, it has come to this. I wanted to find some tweets I made a while ago; I can’t remember when but I can remember it was a re-tweet of someone else’s work.

I asked around last night on Twitter and had some good replies and these are a selection of the options I have found and been directed to.  Thanks go out to the following for their quality replies and help in putting this list together;

And here comes the conundrum … do I keep clicking the ‘More’ button at the page of my latest tweets to go back and back through my tweets, or do I use another service to find what I’m after?

Enter the choices … some are for searching Twitter, others are to backup your Twitter data.

Twitter Search

Search Twitter with the proper and official search tool, but it won’t go back very far or take into account your messages or favourites (like other services do).

Tweetake

Using the Twitter API you can backup a variety of your own data, from followers, favorites, DMs, friends, tweets, or just plain everything!

SnapBird

Here you have the ability to search than just your own timeline; search messages you have received and sent, search someone else’s timeline (not just your own), someone else’s tweets as well as tweets that mention you. Oh, and it searched further back than the basic (or advanced) Twitter search.

TweetBackup

Backup a limited number of tweets (3,200, it’s still quite a few though), and al list of friends.

Google Site Search

This was a good one pointed out to me last night by @kiwicarol – enter a term like “site:twitter.com hopkinsdavid #BB9” will search all of Google’s archive (as they have been archiving tweets for a while now) that contain my Twitter name and the hashtag #BB9. The results aren’t pretty and takes a while to get your eye in to visually filter out RTs and stuff, but still very useful.

I think I’m going to use SnapBird for the moment as, on the face of it, looks like it’ll give me more opportunity to search back through my timeline to find the links and posts I retweeted (and should’ve made a note of at the time!). I’ll let you know how I get on.

As always please share your experience of any of the above techniques or if I’ve missed on you like/hate, please tell us what and why.