How to search for Twitter lists
Here’s how:
I was facilitating some training for Wall Street Journal journalists last week, talking about the advantages of following other people’s Twitter lists, when someone asked me for a way to search for lists.
I remember that there used to be third-party tools that did just that, but a quick check and they are all now dead, presumably killed when Twitter changed its API.
I’m sure other people have come up with this idea in the past but it just occurred to me.
Use the * wildcard in place of a Twitter name. Let me give you an example to explain.
You probably know how to do a site search, limiting a Google search to just one site (site:wsj.com “David Cameron” finds every wsj.com article mentioning the UK prime minister, for example).
Extend that idea to Twitter and add a * wildcard and the search looks like this:
site:twitter.com/*/lists/ukraine
That finds public Twitter lists called ‘Ukraine’.
This search option relies on people using obvious searchable terms when creating a list. This search won’t find lists called 'journalists in Ukraine’, for example. It will find “Ukraine-conflict” or “Ukraine-protests”, however.
Update 10/3: Steve Evans has pointed out another wildcard trick to solve that problem.
@SarahMarshall On your searching Twitter lists, you can also use the wildcard in the list name too eg. site:http://t.co/FTVZVp44hJ
— Steve Evans (@steve_e)March 10, 2014
Finding a list to follow rather than creating one from scratch saves a huge amount of time and is particularly valuable in a breaking news situation when faced with a new topic.
Taking the deep dive
Another way of finding useful lists is to look for a person or account that might have created a list and follow that lead.
If anyone knows of a better way to search lists, do let me know (here’s a link to my email).
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