The advanced part of Twitter search contains a lot of cool functionality, but it’s missing one critical checkbox.

I want to be able to search the tweets of my network. And just my network.

I’m following these folks for a reason. It would be nice to be able to tap into specifically what they think about my question or problem. Being able to see what Twitter’s 15-20 million users think about x is fantastic, but it’s not always what I need or want.

One checkbox. You can leave everything else the same. That’s not too much to ask, is it?

UPDATE (July 15, 2010): Twitter now has some official advice on this which you can read at this page.

Of particular relevance:

1. Your tweets aren’t recent: We only index tweets for about 6 days. If your most recent tweet is older than that, please tweet again and check.

2. Your account is private: Private or “protected” accounts do not appear in search. Learn more about protected accounts here.

3. Your account is new, or you recently changed your username: It can take a few days for new and updated accounts to be indexed by search.

4. Your email is bouncing: If you log in and see a big red warning when you’re at twitter.com that says your email address is having delivery issues, please take the steps to fix it! We want to show you in search, but we need you to fix your email first.

5. You are being filtered out of search due to a quality issue: In order to provide the best search experience for users, Twitter automatically filters search results for quality. This Search Quality help page has information why accounts are filtered from search

6. You are missing because of current resource constraints: Right now, some users may not be seeing their Tweets because of resource constraints. This is more likely affecting you if you’re a new user (with an account less than a couple of weeks old). Our search engineers are working on this known issue, and your Tweets should start showing up in search soon!

If none of this seems very helpful then you’ll need to file a support ticket at this page: http://bit.ly/twicket.

I’ve left my original article intact as below. Please note that it was written in June 2009.

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For five days now, Twitter’s search has been broken. In fact, it’s actually been acting strangely for a lot longer than this – several weeks  - but one particular aspect is relatively new. The problem is, this part has not been broken for everybody, so it hasn’t received as much attention as it probably should.

But it is broken for me. How? The ‘from:’ query in Twitter’s search feature, which lets you see all the posts from a given user, is showing that I last tweeted five days ago.

Now, we know that’s not true, as since that time I’ve submitted about twelve gazillion new tweets.

You can check this for yourself here. See what I mean? I laugh in the face of ‘realtime’.

This Is Just The Beginning

If it was just me being affected by this, I’d think myself either mad, or in the midst of some hideous conspiracy. But I’ve heard it from other people too, including my friend Zagrrl, who also, according to Twitter, hasn’t submitted anything in five days. This is also not true, as you can quickly gauge by looking at her timeline. It gets worse – some of my other contacts haven’t tweeted at all – actually, they have.

The reason why this matters is that many external clients depend on the from: search function to deliver replies to followers. As you may know, I use Seesmic Desktop, and within it I run a search for mentions of my username alongside my standard replies pane. Each time @Zagrrl has replied to me of late, it has not showed up in search. This is the case also for others in my network who have been impacted by this defect.

The catch, as I said above, is from my studies I see that few of the big names on Twitter have been impacted by this issue, or at least are unaware that they have, and this is why I think it is going largely unreported. The thing is, we all have, to a greater or lesser extent – from: seems to be completely ignoring my tweets for the past few days, but it’s ignoring ALL tweets from a week or more ago for everybody on the network. Even Oprah, who according to Twitter has tweeted only once.

It’s not just from:, either – a lot of Twitter’s search functionality is down. In fact, right now, you cannot search back further than 7-10 days (depending on the user) for anything on Twitter. As more than one wag has pointed out, it’s a good thing Twitter is pushing its ‘real-time search’, as right now that’s your only option.

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A few times on this blog (and elsewhere) I’ve made the observation how just because Twitter is – or perhaps more accurately, has been – riding a wave of success and positive PR, it doesn’t mean it will always be that way. Things can change. Fast.

This year, we’ve already had a very unfavourable reaction to Twitter’s decision to remove the facility for users to see all replies; their response to this was equally absurd, to a point where I started to wonder if they have been just winging it all along.

At the moment, the network is struggling with several small bugs, each of which is relatively minor but collectively they’re representative of something more significant.

1. Everybody Is Posting ‘Via Web’

I use Seesmic Desktop. Lots of other folks use TweetDeck, Tweetie, Dabr, Twitroid and all manner of external clients to access the network, but not no more, at least, if Twitter is to be believed, as everybody is currently posting via the web.

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Every once in a while I lose one of my tweets.

And every so often, somebody will ask me about a tweet I published a while ago; typically it will be something I submitted earlier that day, but it might be a week ago, or even longer. That’s a lot of tweets.

This was the tweet we were looking for. I knew I wrote it, they knew I wrote it, and I desperately wanted to be able to find it and re-share that great content. If you tweet as much as I do, it can take hours to go back through your timeline to try and find a single submission. Forgot the haystack; this is like a needle in a stack full of needles.

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Pretty big news from Twitter.com broke yesterday – the interface on the Twitter.com home page has been tweaked, and you no longer have an @replies feed. Instead, it’s been replaced with mentions, which are accessed via clicking on @yourusername in the sidebar (i.e., @sheamus).

(click to enlarge)

This is a great step forward for Twitter. Previously the @replies inbox only listed tweets that began with an @ message to your username; now, any mention of your username (@sheamus, say) in a tweet will appear in this feed, irrespective of where it appears in the message. This includes re-tweets, #followfriday recommendations and so on.

I like this a lot because many people miss non-direct replies and this can only make the stream more engaging, certainly if you predominately use the Twitter.com home page as your main point of access.

However, it’s still not, in my opinion, as good as what can be done using a search pane on TweetDeck, and I’ll be doing (my very first) video tutorial about optimising TweetDeck in this way later this week, which will include tips on minimising that precious API drain.

Since I last wrote about the Twitter top 100 users (by popularity) there have been a few changes in the top ten.

Stephen Fry, who was looking a possible favourite for the overall number one spot just a month ago, has slipped from third to ninth. I’m not sure if there’s been any genuine backlash or whether other more world-famous celebrities have been more readily-followed by newcomers to the network, but he’s definitely lost momentum.

Barack Obama held the number one position quite comfortably this time last month but he’s now been overtaken by the CNN breaking news account (@cnnbrk), although I wouldn’t expect this to continue indefinitely for a couple of reasons. One, that @cnnbrk isn’t actually that good at breaking news, and two, it doesn’t have the global appeal and eagerness to follow you back that Obama’s team does (Mr President doesn’t actually tweet himself). At the time of writing @cnnbrk is following just one other user, some guy called James Cox. Why is this so? (I’ve asked Mr Cox, but have yet to receive a reply.)

A few other celebrities have moved up the leaderboard in the last fortnight, notably @aplusk and @jimmyfallon, and the @twitter account has, possibly rightly-so, entered the top three, but what I want to focus on within this article is the great leaps most of the main Twitter users have seen in their total follow counts.

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One of the most powerful tools on Twitter is the search feature. This function allows you to search the entire Twittersphere for anything you like. Better, the Twitter search runs in real time, meaning that if you leave the search window open it will continue to update throughout the day.

This feature is also built into TweetDeck. Previously I have written about how I had a five-column set-up within TweetDeck. This weekend, however, I reduced this to four, removing the ‘replies’ and ‘direct messages’ panes, and adding a new search column.

Why? Efficiency, first and foremost. One of TweetDeck’s best features is that it notifies you when you get an update. However, if you use groups or a search within TweetDeck there’s a good chance that often two or more panes will be updated with the same Tweet, meaning you get duplicating notifications. That’s not the end of the world but it can be a bit irritating. Furthermore, TweetDeck is already a pretty big drain on your computer’s resources, and less in this case very much equates to more.

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