Ever wanted to search through the tweets from one specific person? Looks like I’m not the only one. Read on for your options.

1. If the tweets are from within the past 10 days or so, you can use Twitter’s search engine with the syntax from:username [keywords]. Here’s the link if you wanted to search for recent tweets from Danny Sullivan that included the word “Google”.
   from:danny sullivan google
2. But what if you want to go back further than 10 days? Twitter tends to drop results after 10 days, but Google doesn’t. Perform a site-specific Google search of the Twitter user’s account using the syntax site:twitter.com/username [keywords]. Here’s what it looks like if you wanted to search all tweets from St. Charles Church’s Twitter account that include the word “Mass”:
   site:twitter.com mass
   (I’ve added the following parameters to the URL: &pws=0 to turn off personalization, &filter=0 to include supplemental results and &num=100 to get 100 results on a page instead of just 10 blue links.
3. Another options is Searchtastic.com, which will perform a similar search as Google (albeit slowly). Here’s the previous query repeated on Searchtastic. The strength of this new tool is the ability to search through a user’s tweets along with the people that user follows. Very helpful for tracking down conversations, especially when some tweets out a request for a recommendation and doesn’t bother to share the results. (If you turn to your followers for an answer then don’t you think they might be interested in the answer as well?)

Those are the options I use, but I’m sure there are others. How do you search an individual’s Twitter stream?

Update – October 22, 2009: Bing is getting in on the searching Twitter action, which is generating a lot of attention. Not to be outdone, Google announced a similar plan albeit without a specific date. Nevertheless, Google succeeded in diluting the perceived exclusiveness of Bing’s announcement by inserting itself into the same news cycle.