Occasionally when you find yourself without access to a computer, performing advanced twitter searches can be difficult; especially if you don’t have the “advanced search operators” memorized. (Attention: twitter app makers -I haven’t located a good advanced search phone app for twitter – help!*)

Luckily, twitter has a great page discussing this on their website.

Unfortunately, the operators were saved on the above page as an image, making it difficult to save them to my notes. So I transcribed them to text, and here they are – I advise you to save these to your notes on your phone so that you have them handy if needed. I also added a simple goecode search example to the bottom of the list. You would need to find the lat/long and insert in place of the one that is there for an example.

Using Advanced twitter search (from twitter help center)

Operator:  =  Finds tweets:

twitter search  =  containing both “twitter and “search”. This is the default operator.

“happy hour”  =  containing the exact phrase “happy hour”.

love OR hate  =  containing either “love” or “hate” (or both).

beer -root  =  containing “beer” but not “root.

#haiku  =  containing the hashtag “haiku”.

from:alexiscold  =  sent from the person “alexiscold”.

to:techcrunch  =  sent to person “techcrunch”.

@mashable  =  referencing person “mashable”.

“happy hour” near:”san francisco”  =  containing the exact phrase “happy hour” and sent near “san francisco”.

near:NYC within:15mi  =  sent within 15 miles of “NYC”.

superhero since:2010-12-27  =  containing “superhero” and sent since date “2010-12-27”.

ftw until:2010-12-27  =  containing “ftw” and sent up to date “2010-12-27”.

movie -scary :)  =  containing “movie”, but not “scary”, and with a positive attitude.

flight :(  =  containing “flight” and with a negative attitude.

traffic ?  =  containing “traffic” and asking a question.

hilarious filter:links  =  containing “hilarious” and linking to URLs.

news source:twitterfeed  =  containing “news” and entered via TwitterFeed.

ALSO geocode searches: 

geocode:45.523452,-122.676207,10km  =  searches a specific lat/long within 10km

(smallest possible geosearch is .1km and largest is 2500km)

you can use geocode along with combinations of the above search operators

Note: find the lat/long for a place or an address here:

http://itouchmap.com/latlong.html

If you’re an emergency manager or disaster organization employee that’s responsible for a specific region or place, you may want to find and save some lat/longs ahead of time to speed up your search creation.

Also see:

 Twitter for Newsrooms: #Report 

reason for this post: this morning while trying to do some advanced searches from my iPhone, I realized that you cannot get to the advanced search twitter page from an iPhone or iPad because as soon as you enter the URL “twitter.com/search-advanced” in a mobile browser, you’re directed to twitter mobile app and told that the page you are searching for doesn’t exist : (

* If you know of a good twitter advanced search app for iPhone or Android, please post in the comments.