I spend an unhealthy amount of time on Twitter these days. It’s my go-to for breaking news. It’s still the place I go to discover good stories to read and even to find tools to feature here on the newsletter.
But there aren’t a ton of good tools for searching Twitter. It’s one of the network’s biggest weaknesses.
The Knight Lab at Northwestern may have a solution, though.
They have a new Twitter search tool out, called twXplorer. It won’t solve all of your Twitter search woes, but it does do a few things really well.
First: twXplorer isn’t designed to help you dig deep into Twitter’s archives. It’s all about taking a snapshot of what’s happening right now around certain phrases. You can enter a phrase not just a hashtag into their search engine, and it’ll pull up results from the past 500 tweets.
From there, you can see popular recent tweets around the phrase, and also see what links are getting shared around that phrase.
And best yet: You can save a “snapshot” of your search for future reference. So over the course of a breaking news event, you could save several snapshots and see how a story changed over the course of several hours.
Give twXplorer a test run it’s free and open to anyone on Twitter.
Now get out there and tell some great stories today!