How to Use Twitter’s Advanced Search Tool

Twitter’s basic search function is available from virtually every Twitter page or mobile app tab, but for more specific searches, you need to access its advanced search tool. Here’s how:

Optional Alternative: Download Your Twitter Archive to Search Your Tweets

Twitter’s Advanced Search is the fastest way to search through your own tweets, or for any tweets at all for that matter. But if you want, you can get access to all the tweets you’ve ever sent by downloading your entire Twitter archive. Here’s how:

An exact phrase. Any group of words. None of a group of specific words. Specific hashtags. Any language. Tweets to specific users. User mentions. Locations. Date or time period. Happy face signs :) or sad face signs :(. Question marks. Retweets included.

For example, to search for any tweets about Facebook from the @LifewireTech Twitter account. You would type “lifewiretech” in the From these accounts field and the word “Facebook” in the All of these words field. After selecting Search, you see a regular search results page of all the tweets from @LifewireTech containing the term “Facebook” listed in order of most recent. Go to More > Settings and privacy > Download an archive of your data. You need to enter your password to access the page. From there, select Request archive. You might have to wait some time before you receive your archive, but when you do, it’s in a ZIP file you can download to your computer. There you can access a list of your tweets in a spreadsheet format, which you can search through.