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How to search Twitter like a pro

Twitter's search operators and advanced search can help you cut through the blather to find what it is you are looking for.

Matt Elliott Senior Editor
Matt Elliott is a senior editor at CNET with a focus on laptops and streaming services. Matt has more than 20 years of experience testing and reviewing laptops. He has worked for CNET in New York and San Francisco and now lives in New Hampshire. When he's not writing about laptops, Matt likes to play and watch sports. He loves to play tennis and hates the number of streaming services he has to subscribe to in order to watch the various sports he wants to watch.
Expertise Laptops, desktops, all-in-one PCs, streaming devices, streaming platforms
Matt Elliott

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Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

With an average of 6,000 tweets per second, or 500 million tweets a day, Twitter can be an overwhelming source of information. Even if you have crafted a finely tuned list of people to follow that's not too big and not too small but just right, your feed can often obscure useful or interesting tweets and tidbits with a seemingly unyielding stream of jibber jabber.

Thankfully, Twitter has a powerful search tool, and you don't need a Twitter account to use it. Just head to Twitter's search page and do one of two things.

1. Use search operators

Twitter lets you refine your search with a number of useful search operators. A list of examples can be accessed from Twitter's main search page.

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Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

2. Use advanced search

If you'd rather fill out a few fields to refine your search query than commit a search operator or two to memory, then click the advanced search link on the main search page where you can narrow search parameters for words, people, places, and dates. And at the bottom, you can even filter by attitude to include only tweets deemed positive or negative.

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Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

Source Gizmo's Freeware, via Lifehacker.