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:

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:

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.