There’s a story over on Search Engine Land that discusses the number of searches carried out on Twitter every month. This is following the redesign on the Twitter homepage to make the service more search focused.

At the Twitter Chirp conference Co founder Ev Williams said that the service is handling a massive 19 billion searches per month. That, incredibly, is more than Bing and Yahoo combined. And that’s from a service that is in reality just 3 years old.

Here’s the official monthly search figures of all the top players, according to comScore:

Google: 88 billion per month
Twitter: 19 billion per month
Yahoo: 9.4 billion per month
Bing: 4.1 billion per month

Google numbers are for more than just the search engine, and include those for images, maps and –crucially – YouTube). As you can see, Twitter is now in position 2.

However, there are a few holes in Twitter figures. For a starter they’re self reporting. Secondly, those searches are often made by third party applications such as desktop clients tweetdeck and Seesmic.

And thirdly – and most significantly – many are ‘standing queries’ that are being carried out on a users behalf. For example, one of my columns in Tweetdeck is a search for ‘webeden’, so I can have a look to see if anyone is mentioning us. I’m not making that search every day, but did it once when I set up Tweetdeck. But now Tweetdeck is carrying out that search on my behalf every 150 seconds throughout the day.

Last but not least, many users choose to display their Twitter profile or a keyword search on their websites. (If you want to do this watch our tutorial on how to put your Twitter profile on your website). In these cases it’s the actual websites that are making constant, standing searches on Twitter.

So the figure of 19bn might be not quite what we’d understand as 19bn if it was searches being carried out on one of the traditional search engines. They aren’t all individual varied searches for information, products or services.

As for the actual Twitter Search page, it contributes just ‘ a few million’ searches per months. Here’s our in depth guide on how to search on Twitter.

Do you find Twitter search useful? Were you even aware it existed? Leave us a comment below.

In the previous two posts about search on Twitter, we showed you how to get more out of Twitter Search by using the advanced search form, and how to use advanced search operators on Twitter.

These are both useful way to find out a bit more detail about what people are saying on Twitter, and the context of those Tweets. By experimenting with these you should be able to drill down to exactly the right information that you want to find. Since it’s taken you a while to work out this the precise nature of your search, you don’t want to go through the whole process again. That’s where saving your searches comes in.

Any search you can think of can be saved so that you can come back to it later. On your Twitter home page there is a search box on the right hand sidebar. If you carry out a search from here, you have the option of saving this search. A ‘save this search’ link appears on the top right hand side of the search results page.

Here’s what it looks like:

If you press ‘save this search’, it will appear in the ‘saved searches’ list underneath the search bar. If you want to quickly carry out this search again, just click on the link and the search will be carried out instantly. If you find you actually don’t need to run this search again, just click ‘Remove this saved search’ up on the top right hand side of the search results.

Here’s what that looks like:

That’s it for this mini series of getting more out of Twitter search. If you find anything that we could add to this series, please let us know and we can include it in a follow up post.

On Monday we showed you how to get more out of Twitter Search by using the advanced search form. Today we take you even deeper into Twitter search by talking about search ‘operators’.

A search ‘operator’ is a word or symbol used in conjunction with a keyword that specifies that you only want to find mentions of that keyword in a particular context. All search engines allow the use of ‘operators’, but they aren’t very well known.

For example, if you wanted to find mentions of the keywords ‘fast car’ on Twitter, you might type ‘fast car’ into the search field. The results will show mentions of the phrase ‘fast car’, but also mentions of just the keyword ‘fast’ or just the keyword ‘car’. This might therefore show irrelevant results. You might find mentions of phrases like ‘fast food’ or similarly ‘car servicing’. To be more accurate, if you wanted to find out when the exact phrase ‘fast car’ had been used then you’d need to use the operator “ “ in your search, as in “fast car”. The results will then just show when the words ‘Fast Car’ (those words, in that order) had been mentioned.

Operators perform many of the advanced search parameters used by the advanced search form mentioned on Monday’s post. The advantage of operators is that you type them directly into the search field, rather than filling out the form. They are popular amongst more advanced users, or those who come from a development or IT background, since they are a short cut but you do need to remember what they are.

Here is a list of all the advanced search operators on Twitter:

As you can see, an easy way to look for positive or negative mentions of a particular word is to use a :-) or :-( with your keyword.

Other operators include “near”,  to find out mentions of a keyword in a geographic proximity to a location.

For the most advanced, you can search for Tweets that just contain links to other websites, by using the operator “filter:links”.

If you want to find people who are just using Twitter from particular 3rd party applications you can do that too, by using the operator “source:Web” or “source:Tweetdeck” to find people just updating using the web, or Tweetdeck.

You can find a full list of operators here.

Have a go at using some advanced search operators on Twitter and let us know how you get on.

This is the first on a series of posts about how to use Twitter Search.

We’ve talked about Twitter search quite a bit on this blog. The chance to see what people are talking about in real time has been an exciting development in the world of search.

But searching on Twitter can give you so much more depth than finding out who is using particular keywords in their Tweets. Because thanks to Twitter’s Advanced Search Interface you can start looking for mentions of a particular keyword in very specific circumstances. And these can sometimes bring up very interesting results.

The place to start is the Advanced Search Interface, which can be found here and looks like this:

As you can see from the form, you can be very specific about your search. To start with, you can specify the keyword context. Are you looking for general mentions of a keyword, or only when it is used with other keywords?

You can then take a look at who is mentioning a particular word, and who is receiving this keyword in their @ Tweets. This might be an effective way of monitoring how your competition are using Twitter: Do they get asked for lots of price quotes? Or are they dealing with lots of support requests? Does this mean that they are using Twitter more effectively than you are? What can you learn from that?

You can also just look at Tweets that have happened within a particular time frame. This might be useful for trying to find out how a particular event has been discussed at the time of the event, compared to how it is discussed now. You could also use this to look at how your competitors are changing their use of Twitter over time.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of Twitter search is that you can also search for tweets that have a particular ‘attitude’. For example, if you want to find all the Tweets that mention a particular keyword in a positive way, then the results will show all those Tweets in the time frame that use common ‘Smilies’ and other positive statements. Once again, this might be a good way of finding out how you or your competitors are being mentioned.

Finally, it’s possible to specify the location of Tweets, and set a radius of miles around which you want to find all the mentions of a particular keyword. These use the location set by each user in their profile, but mobile users already have the option of including their actual coordinates. This might be good at finding out, particularly if your business has a fixed location (such as a shop), how frequently local people are Tweeting about you.

Twitter search can also go a lot deeper, but we’ll be covering that in tomorrow’s post on ‘How to use advanced search operators on Twitter‘.

Have a go on Twitter’s Advanced Search function and see what you can find out.