Twitter dorks! Part 2

Continuing with our previous discussion about Twitter dorks, let’s see some more advanced Twitter operators and we’ll also try to explore the Twitter Advanced Search, similar to Google’s Advanced Search.

• since & until

As we have already discussed about since operator, let’s try to supplement that with until operator.

As you can see in the above image, I’m using From:@handleName with since:yyyy-mm-dd & until:yyyy-mm-dd; as a result, I was able to obtain tweets from particular dates from the specified handle.

Who tweeted first?

The first tweet on Twitter was made by Jack Dorsey, co-founder and the CEO of Twitter. Here’s his first tweet.

Well, this wasn’t a tough nut to crack, if you go to https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-advanced-search, there you’ll find few links which are quite helpful. But, what if there is an event which has led to Twitter storm, and you have to find who made the first tweet about that? Is it even possible to find the origin among of flurry of tweets, retweets and hashtags? Scrolling up is not an option! With the help of epoch time, you can be able to go back in time and see who made the first tweet about a particular event. Isn’t that exciting?

Let’s take an example (Indian context) and try to find who tweeted about the event first.

Here I’ve visited https://www.epochconverter.com/, and have assumed few values(based on date of the incident) which could possibly lead me to the first tweet about a particular incident (In our case, Balakot Airstrike ).

As you can see from the above image, I was able to find the first tweet put out by an handle on the date that I was looking for. I have used the keyword Balakot with until:<epoch time>. You cannot get the tweet straight away, you have to adjust the epoch time based on your requirement. Trial and error method is more likely to fetch you exact results.

Twitter Advanced search

Like Google, Twitter also provides advanced search facility to its users. We’ll see with an example how it actually works. In this example, I’m going to advanced search that how many times, Indian PM Narendra Modi has used the word criticism, in his tweets.

The first six screenshots shows all the toolbars where you can input different parameters and the next three screenshots gives you the results. The advanced search is just like operators with a GUI. Try to limit your parameters, instead figure out powerful keywords for better results.