InvestigationU

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X / Twitter Advanced Search Builder

X still has the most powerful search syntax of any major platform, and it is almost entirely undocumented in the interface. Fill in what you know and this assembles it.

Location search only catches posts where the account chose to attach a location, which is a small minority. Useful when it hits, never assume it is complete.

The two searches that matter most

Everything one account ever posted, oldest first, is from:username with the Latest tab. That is how you read somebody’s history in order rather than in the jumble the timeline gives you.

The second is to:username, which returns replies sent to that account. People are far less careful in a reply than in their own posts, and replies are where you find the associates.

Date ranges are the underused one

If you know something happened in a particular week, bounding the search to those seven days turns an unusable pile of results into a readable page. Combine a date range with from: and you can reconstruct exactly what an account was saying while an event was going on.

Note that X requires you to be signed in to see most search results now. If you are logged out you will get a prompt instead of results — that is X, not this tool.

Where Google beats X

X search does not reliably reach content more than a few years old. Google indexed a great deal of it while it was public. The Google button runs the same terms with site:x.com OR site:twitter.com, which will sometimes find a post that X itself will not return.

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