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X / Twitter Advanced Search Builder
X still has the most powerful search syntax of any major platform, and it’s almost entirely undocumented in the interface. Fill in what you know and this assembles it.
Quick check
One sum and it runs. This keeps bots from draining the tool, and you will not be asked again for a week.
The two searches that matter most
Everything one account ever posted, oldest first, is from:username with the
Latest tab. That’s 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’re logged out you’ll get a prompt instead of results — that’s X, not this tool.
Where Google beats X
X search doesn’t 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 won’t return.
Related
Course
X / Twitter OSINT
The full search syntax, the archive sources, and the methods for working out who is behind an anonymous account.
See the course