Advanced Boolean Search for My Community and Discover Twitter Users

The advanced search syntax is a powerful way to better define your search query, based on multiple criteria and operators, to get more specific and targeted search results.

 

The guidelines for performing a user search with advanced syntax in the search field within My Community or Discover Twitter Users in Connect are as follows:

 

• The operator AND (or a space) returns users with both words in the search field.
  • e.g. ‘marketing AND social’  or ‘marketing social’ returns users with both of these two words.

• The operator OR returns users with either word in the search field.
  • e.g. ‘marketing OR social’ returns all users with either of these two words.

• The operator NOT returns all users without that specific word in the search field.
  • e.g. ‘marketing NOT social’ returns users with marketing but not social.

• Single or double quotations, search for an exact phrase.
  • e.g. ‘social media’ or “social media”.

• Parentheses can be used to force the priority of the operators. For example, the following two searches would return different results:
  • (bio:marketing OR bio:social) AND location:Madrid
  • bio:marketing OR (bio:social AND location:Madrid) 

Examples:

A) Let’s search for users based in ‘Boston’ or ‘London’, with the words ‘Marketing’ or ‘Social’ in their bios. There are two ways to do this, both of which return exactly the same results.

1. You can use the bio and location fields in the search/filter sidebar to enter your keywords.

• The search criteria are shown in the breadcrumb bar at the top.

Or

2. You can use the general search field at the top of the search/filter sidebar.

• The search query is shown in the breadcrumb bar.
• The search categories (name, bio, location) must be followed by a colon (:), for example:
  • (bio:marketing OR bio:social) AND (location:boston OR location:london)

 

B) Let’s search for users with the words ‘urban’ and ‘planner’ in their bios but exclude those users with the words ‘politician’ and ‘event’ in their bios. The query to write in the general search field would be:

• • bio: planner AND urban AND (NOT politician AND NOT event) 

 

There are other search options to bear in mind when using the general search field:

 

For language searches, write: lang:___

• • To find those users who have Twitter.com configured in English write: ‘
    lang:en’
    
    

 

For Country searches, write: Country:____

• • To find those in Spain, write: country:ES

For time zone searches, write: timezone:_____

• • To find those users who use the Madrid time zone write: ‘timezone:madrid’

For URL searches, write: url:_____

• • To find those users who have a specific url, e.g. ‘www.audiense.com’ in their bio write: ‘url:www.audiense.com’

 

For screenname/handle searches write: screenname:_____

• • To search for a specific user screenname write, for example, ‘screenname:@amnestyuk’ or ‘screenname:amnestyuk’.

 

For notes searches write: notes:_____

• To find those users with the word ‘important’ in their notes write: ‘notes:important’

For tag searches, write: tag:_____

• To find those users who have a specific tag added to their profile.