I built this how-to guide and list earlier today as a collaborative document, (link below) and I hope that others may still wish to add to the effort.
(Here’s the full link to this page for sharing: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VcTW4bRXibWTjLUnT-62SihF7hj6wRYEYKRkh6fa1zs/edit )

twitter searches:
Here’s a 10 – column word search using common words that might pull good results for sifting twitter for disaster info:
(also I’ve added a “-RT” in order to limit returns to the original tweets)
http://tweetgrid.com/grid?l=13&q1=-RT+flood+library+sandy&q2=-RT+flood+museum+sandy&q3=-RT+flood+art+sandy&q4=-RT+flood+archives+sandy&q5=-RT+flood+heritage+center+sandy&q6=-RT+flood+gallery+sandy&q7=-RT+flooding+museum+sandy&q8=-RT+flooding+storage+sandy&q9=-RT+roof+gallery+sandy&q10=-RT+roof+museum+sandy

To set up more searches on tweetgrid – go here: http://tweetgrid.com
• select the amount of columns and layout for columns in your search, then add searches.
• you can also save the searches that you make.  After you set up your searches, click on “ Full Address” in the menu at the top of the window, then copy the full address out of the URL (web address) window in your browser. Save this search for later use, or share with other.

Great post by friend Cheryl Bledsoe (@CherylBle)  on twitter filtering and sharing crisis-related information:
Filtering Out the Noise

__________

Multicolumn Geosearches:
twitter can also be searched by latitude/longitude, from the center of the lat/long out, the smallest search possible is .1km, and the largest saerch possible is 2500km.

Here’s a pre-built template to which you can add any lat/long:
http://tweetgrid.com/grid?l=10&q1=geocode%3A___%2C.1km&q2=geocode%3A___%2C10km&q3=geocode%3A___%2C50km&q4=geocode%3A___%2C100km&q5=geocode%3A___%2C200km

The above search is set for the following ranges: searches at: .1km – 10km – 50km – 100-km and 200km

Go here to obtain a lat/long for the desired location:
http://itouchmap.com/latlong.html
• enter an address or city/state, or place of interest
• copy/paste the lat/long with no spaces in to the tweetgrid underlined ”blanks”
• press search
• add additional search words and a blank space to refine the results, such as the word flood sandy museum etc…

Additional info on geosearches available here:
Examples: Searching Twitter by location and with specific keywords by Gahlord Dewald of ThoughtFaucet

Other advances twitter searches
You can also do some very advanced and yet simple searches right within twitter: https://twitter.com/search-advanced

__________

Other useful social media search sites/webapps:
most of these search twitter, facebook, blogs & other social media sites

Icerocket – http://www.icerocket.com/
Bing Social – http://www.bing.com/social/social
Social Mention – http://socialmention.com/
Kurrently- http://www.kurrently.com/
Also would be useful to monitor LinkedIn