Searching Twitter is like drinking an Ipecac martini.
Adam Rifkin stashed this in Twitter!
Twitter is deleting my Posterous blog so I'm copying my June 8, 2010 post below.
Stashed in: Search, @ifindkarma, Alcohol!, Family Guy
I was posterousing about how people are bad at predicting what will make them happy.
And I wanted to find the article Jennifer Aaker retweeted about predicting happiness so I could link to it.
You would not believe how hard it is to find a tweet.
I mean, she has only tweeted 1100 times, so it should be easy, right?
Go ahead and try to find it by paging through her tweets. I'll wait.
Here's an image to inspire you.
...
Give up?
Every Twitter search engine seems to be obsessed with what just happened.
(Frankly, that kind of "only real time matters" attitude is so 5 minutes ago.)
But sometimes I want to find a tweet from months or years ago.
Am I the only one who wants this? Argh!!
Searching Twitter is like drinking an Ipecac martini. Who wants chowder?
I love that Family Guy puking video.
Every time I try to search Twitter I'm reminded of it.
Here are the comments from the above post, though I note that both searchtweetsbydate.com and bettwween.com are now dead:
Thank you Lucas for mentioning this helpful service...http://searchtweetsbydate.com/
...though it would be much more helpful to have searchtweetsbydateandkeywords.com ...
Almost 3 years ago Lucas Meadows responded:
It looks like the Twitter API call that searchtweetsbydate.com must be using also supports keyword search. I wonder why Twitter doesn't just create an on-site advanced search then...
Almost 3 years ago Adam Rifkin responded:
I wonder why too, Lucas.Either they don't think it's important, or they do think it's important but it's not a high priority.
I also found http://bettwween.com/ which lets us search for all the tweets between two people.
Almost 2 years ago Adam Rifkin responded:
Btw most Twitter accounts have under 10 followers.
And 20,000 users are responsible for half of all tweets.
http://ifindkarma.posterous.com/74-of-twitter-users-have-under-10-followers
4:57 PM Apr 09 2013