Twitter is a storehouse of information, but how to sort out the gems from among all of the nonsense? Here are some little known tools that will help you find what you need.

Twitter’s own tools

Searching Twitter became easier once the search box was added to the menu on the right of your tweets. Here you can perform searches and save them for later.

But what if you search results are still not great? Visit Twitter Advanced Search where you can modify your search to bring results in a particular language, from a particular person, reflecting a particular mood and much more.

If you don’t want to leave your Twitter home page to search, many of the options on the Advanced Search page are available as operators that you can add to your search in the regular Twitter search box.

Search Twitter in two languages

2lingual Twitter is a cool tool that lets you search Twitter for information in two languages at the same time. It can also translate your query for you (default setting). At the moment it supports these 21 languages: Arabic, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Thai. Here is an example search showing results for iPad in English and French.

Find images and videos on Twitter

On Twitcaps, you can search for images shared on Twitter. This is useful in many circumstances, but particularly for breaking news, like this example search for images from the flood in Pakistan.

You can find videos shared on Twitter with Twitmatic. You do your search and a list of tweets appear. When you decide which video you want to watch, click Play Video and the video is displayed inline.

Another great image search engine for Twitter is Twicsy. In addition to searching the index of 140 million pictures, you can filter
search results by date or browse related tags.

Twitter search intro

If you are new to Twitter search, have a look at this short video from CommonCraft that gives a fun and easy introduction to Twitter search: