Category Archives: search

Targeting the Long Tail of Search

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Lately, I’ve been using this blog to post about simple things that don’t have any useful (or at least clear) results in Google.  This include tips and tricks on platforms like WordPress and Magento, or some straightforward advice for beginners in PHP, MySQL, or whatever tool I’m using at the time of writing.

If I’m stumped on something for awhile, and eventually discover a solution, I’ll post it.  If I find a partial or unclear solution on the web, I’ll try to include a better answer here.

The point is, I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel.  The goal is to offer up something that is hopefully unique and helpful to each visitor that lands here.  As a result, this blog isn’t really readable in serial format (using RSS, for instance).

Despite focusing on the long tail of search, my number one most visited blog post is still the Edible Flying Spaghetti Monster.  Go figure.

HOWTO: Search Twitter Without Username

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Sometimes when using Twitter’s global search functionality (http://search.twitter.com/), the result set is sub par because  a user by the name of your keyword hogs all the results.

Let’s say I wanted to search for what people are tweeting about the popular deals site, dealnews.  But when I go to the aforementioned Twitter search, and use the keyword ‘dealnews,’ I get back a ton of tweets from the official dealnews Twitter account.  Given that I was looking for people’s opinions, this isn’t exactly what I had in mind:

Twitter search results for keyword 'dealnews'

So how do you get around this?

Fortunately, Twitter allows you to include search operators, so the quickest way would be to reform the keyword search to look like this:

dealnews -from:dealnews

The minus sign means to omit any matches that were sent from the user dealnews.  And there you have it:

Fixed keyword search for term 'dealnews'

Use this trick to filter your search results and remove any users junking up your search.  In this case, the result set was still poor, but that’s because not a lot of people wrote about dealnews in the past hours.  Just a lot of retweets.