How to Google search a users tweets in twitter

I wrote a post a short time back on how to use Google to search for interesting twitter users using a search string.

The full post is called Using Google Search to find interesting Twitter Users and it has full details on how to use the search for bio and location.

I just came across a tweet by @miralize asking if there was a way to search for words and phrases in the twitter users stream and decided I would try a nother variable on that search string as a shot in the dark and see if it worked.  Seems that I got lucky.

If you want to look for specific words or phrases specifically in the twitter users stream, open google and paste this search string into the search bar changing the red text to the words or phrases you want to find:

site:twitter.com/* tweets+what are you looking for

It seems to work. But the results are not exact.

If I change the string to:

site:twitter.com/* tweets+Get in touch with me if you want, happy to see if I can help.

I get this Google search result back.

The results listed are all tweets that have used the words in my search string, however they are truncated and spread out throughout the tweet itself.

So i decided to mess around a little more with the string and found that if I use this variable:

site:twitter.com/* tweets“Get in touch with me if you want, happy to see if I can help.”

I get the exact match on the phrase I am searching for.  All that was required was the removal of the + sign and the inclusion of the ” marks around the full term, as you can see above.

Might come in useful if you know someone said something a while back and you want to try and find that information again.

*Update*

Updated in a second post on how to apply date range search to tweets via a simple process.  Could be used to monitor a brand name, personal name or subject at a given time.  Hope it comes in useful.

Monitoring tweets about your brand with Google