Block Retweets For More Effective Twitter Searches

Searching on Twitter can be an effective way to keep up with current events, but endless “retweets” of the same message can result in lots of repetition. Here’s how to fix that problem.

Steven Noble wanted to track news from Iran via Twitter, but noticed that simply searching for relevant terms produced a lot of retweet repetition (where a message is copied and forwarded). However, since Twitter supports using a minus sign to exclude terms, adding

-RT

to the end of the search produces the required results. (RT is the abbreviation used to show a message is being retweeted.) While this seems especially topical for the Iran election right now, it’s a simple but useful technique for any Twitter search with a lot of “echo”. Thanks Steven!