How To Search Twitter History: Find Any Old Tweet

Scrolling through your Twitter timeline to find that one tweet can be tiresome. But what if we say, Instead, of scanning the entire timeline, you can just jump on to that particular tweet. Sounds interesting, right?

Well, Twitter allows you the feature to find any old tweet without actually scrolling the entire feed. In this article, we are going to share our tips on how to search Twitter history or find any old tweet. Stay connected to know more.

Method 1: Twitter Advanced Search

You would find this the easiest way to search old tweets.

1. Just log in to your Twitter account, and head towards Twitter’s advanced search page.

2. Look for the “From these accounts” field and enter your username under the “People” subheading.

3. You can select the required start and end dates under “Dates” for your search.

4. Then, Click on “Search,” and Twitter should return a list of top tweets from that period

5. You can simply click on the “Latest” tab to see every tweet from that time period which in return should show you a list of every tweet you had sent between the start and end dates specified by you.

6. Worry not, even if you don’t remember the exact time period of the tweet. You can try the “Words” advanced search function and search the tweet by any word that you remember.

All of these words — will only return tweets that contain all of these words.

This exact phrase — will only return tweets with these exact words, written in this exact order.

Any of these words — will only return tweets that contain at least one of these words.

Method 2: Twitter Advanced Search, Hacker Style

You might have noticed the blue bar on the top of the search results page when doing an advanced search.

These bars are used to do advanced searches directly in the main Twitter box without having the need to visit the advanced search page. The text inside the bar is called “search operators”.

Have a look at what each one of these does:

Typing “from:username” into Twitter search will return all tweets sent by @username

Typing “since:yyyy-mm-dd” into Twitter search will return all tweets sent since yyyy-mm-dd

Typing “until:yyyy-mm-dd” into Twitter search will return all tweets sent until yyyy-mm-dd

Further, you can combine these operators to form one big operator and perform an advanced search as done in method 1.

From:username since:yyyy-mm-dd until:yyyy-mm-dd

Method 3: Ask Twitter For A Complete Archive Of Your Tweets

You can keep on requesting an archive of your tweets from time to time. It’s a good social media practice in general. Besides, it is also a great way to retrieve some old tweets.

Twitter will return to you a complete, browsable archive of every tweet you’ve ever sent from your handle. Just follow these steps:

1. Go to https://twitter.com/settings/account

2. Click on the “Request your archive” button under “Content”

3. Depending on the tweet sizes, it can take minutes, hours, or sometimes even days for Twitter to prepare your archive.

When done, Twitter will send you a notification.

Just go to https://twitter.com/settings/account and click “Download archive” under the “Download your data” section.

4. Make sure your email address is up to date when you do this. Furthermore, Twitter also sends a download link to your email apart from push notifications.

5. You would receive a .zip file with all your old tweets. Just download it and view your archive in two ways:

•  You can double-click on the index.html file to view your archive directly in your web browser and browse your tweets by month.
•  You can also open the tweets.csv file in your preferred spreadsheet program to see a more detailed breakdown of your tweets.

Method 4: Use A Third-Party App To See Everything You’ve Posted On One Page

There are third-party apps that can help you find all your tweets in one place. Ex. AllMyTweets.

1. Visit https://www.allmytweets.net/ and sign in using your Twitter account.

2. Enter the username you’d like to look up old tweets for.

3. The loading process might take a while. But AllMyTweets will eventually generate a list of every tweet you’ve sent, arranged in serial order, all on one webpage.

4. You can use the checkboxes at the top of the page to hide retweets and replies. However, be careful if you’re loading a huge number of tweets—AllMyTweets will start over from scratch every time you check or uncheck a box.

Method 5: Deleting All Your Tweets

Let’s say you’ve tried everything and yet are not able to find that tweet. What could you do next?

Instead of just randomly picking, it might sometimes be easier to mass-delete tweets.

You can check services like Cardigan that are free to use. Here’s how it works:

1. Sign in to Cardigan using your Twitter account.

2. Click on “Get Started.”

3. Press the “Tweets” button under “What do you want to delete?”

4. Cardigan lets you fetch your last 3,200 tweets for free. For older tweets, it charges a 99¢ fee per 10,000 tweets.

5. Select “Fetch for Twitter” and wait for Cardigan to import all of your tweets. The Tweets are ready to browse then.

6. Cardigan lets you browse your tweets with a variety of options like newest to oldest, most to least retweets, most to least favourites, and vice versa.

It also lets you filter out retweets and replies, and search old tweets that contain specific words, hashtags, or usernames.

7. Click on a tweet to select it, and click “Delete Selected” to delete all currently selected tweets. If you just want to delete every single tweet you’ve imported, hit “Delete All”!

Besides, you could also try a free service like TweetDelete. It wipes your Twitter history and also lets you set a timer to automatically delete future tweets.

Method 6: Try The Wayback Machine

What if the tweet you’re looking for is already deleted, and you don’t have access to the Twitter archive for the account it was sent from?

You might try searching for it using the Wayback Machine. It doesn’t give you back your original tweets but it does have screenshots of popular Twitter pages from specific dates.
Here’s how to search old tweets using the Wayback Machine:

• Go to https://archive.org/web/, type the full URL of the Twitter page whose tweets you’re looking for into the field at the top of the page, and press “Browse History.”
• The Wayback Machine will present you with every single screenshot it has taken of that Twitter page, organized by year and day.
• Select which year you’d like to see tweets from in the timeline, and click on a date bubble.
• 4. Wayback Machine will show you a screenshot of the Twitter page exactly as it appeared on that day. Most old screenshots of Twitter will contain the first 20 or so tweets that appeared on the page that day, but won’t let you scroll to see older tweets.

To conclude

Twitter is a great place to share your thoughts, views, and updates but sometimes you just want to find and delete some mistakes of the past. Scrolling the entire feed is not a smart move. Try the above-mentioned tips and share in the comments what you feel about the same.

If you find this article informative, share it with others too.