Everyone knows that search.twitter.com (formerly Summize) is a great way to aggregate or find tweets with certain criteria. Here’s a few more tricks that will help you narrow your search results:

1. Use a boolean: searching Obama OR McCain will give you results containing either of those keywords. String them together as you like (Gustav OR Josephine OR Ike). If you want tweets about Obama but not McCain, search Obama -McCain.
2. Phrase queries: If you’re trying to string together multiple words, wrap them in quotation marks (“is down” vs is down) to match that exact phrase.
3. Use hashtags to follow topics: If you’re wanting to follow a topic that’s also a common word (#fail vs fail), be sure to include the hash sign (#) to limit your results to the topic you’re looking for.
4. Find updates with a word and emoticons: This one isn’t so much useful as it is just neat. Try searching panda :( and you’ll find a bunch of sad pandas. Or, use panda :) to find happy pandas.
5. Use link filters: Try using filter:links to find tweets with links in it. For example dmtweetup filter:links retrieves all tweets with the word dmtweetup that contain links.
6. Geographical searching: Use the keywords near and within to find tweets near a geographical location. near:”Des Moines” within:30mi fetches tweets made from a 30 mile radius around Des Moines. Go ahead and add a keyword to really hone in your area. For the rest of the world, substitute mi with km.
7. Find tweets to/from a user: from: and to: are great for getting tweets sent from and to a user. You can also search @chewbocka to find anything that references that user, since Twitter doesn’t consider a reply to be anything but tweets where the name is first (ie @alice @bob isn’t a reply to bob)
8. Make searches time sensitive: to limit results to a certain timeframe, either since A and/or before B, use the operators since: and until:. Format the dates as YYYY-MM-DD and you can limit tweets to just September 2.

Searches are case insensitive, so don’t worry about how you type it – just be sure to spell it correctly.

Got other neat search tricks? Leave them in the comments for everyone to enjoy.