Search Operators on X (Twitter): The Ultimate Guide

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💡 Use Cases for Advanced Filtering

• Brand Monitoring: Find every mention of your product while excluding your own official accounts.
• Competitor Audits: Extract only the most viral content from a competitor using min_faves.
• Lead Generation: Find users asking questions in your niche by combining keywords with the ? operator.
• Media Archiving: Collect all high-resolution images or videos from a specific event or news story.

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🛠 How to Build Your Query

1. Sorsa Search Builder: Use our Visual Playground. It’s a GUI where you toggle filters, and it generates the API-ready string for you.
2. Manual Construction: Use the operators listed below to build a string (e.g., (Marketing OR Advertising) min_faves:100).
3. X Native Copy-Paste: Go to X Advanced Search, apply your filters, hit search, and simply copy the text from the search bar directly into your API request.

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📖 The Complete Operator Dictionary

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1. Basic Logic & Keywords

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2. Engagement & Quality Control

• min_faves:X — Tweets with at least X likes.
• min_retweets:X — Tweets with at least X retweets.
• min_replies:X — Tweets with at least X replies.
• filter:verified — Only tweets from “Legacy” verified accounts.
• filter:blue_verified — Only tweets from X Premium (Blue) subscribers.
• filter:has_engagement — Filters out “ghost” tweets with zero interactions.

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3. User & Account Filters

• from:username — Sent by a specific user.
• to:username — Sent as a reply to a specific user.
• @username — Tweets mentioning a user.
• list:12345 — Tweets from members of a specific List ID.
• filter:news — Tweets linking to recognized news websites (e.g., NYT, BBC).

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4. Content & Media Types

• filter:images / filter:videos — Tweets with photos or videos.
• filter:links — Tweets containing any URL.
• card_name:animated_gif — Find tweets specifically with GIFs.
• card_name:poll2choice_text_only — Find tweets containing polls.
• filter:safe — Excludes NSFW or “Potentially Sensitive” content.

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5. Date, Time & Precision

• since:2025-01-01 / until:2025-01-31 — Date filtering (YYYY-MM-DD).
• within_time:2d — Search within the last 2 days (supports h for hours, m for minutes).
• since_id:ID / max_id:ID — Use Snowflake IDs for hyper-precise time boundaries.

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6. Niche & Language Operators

• lang:en — Filter by language (supports ru, es, fr, etc.).
• lang:und — Undefined language (useful for finding tweets with only emojis or links).
• #hashtag — Search for specific hashtags.
• source:twitter_ads — Find tweets created via the X Ads platform.
• geocode:40.71,-74.00,10km — Search tweets within a specific radius of coordinates (e.g., New York).

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🧪 Practical Query Examples (Copy-Paste)

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🛠 API Integration

{
  "query": "(artificial intelligence OR AI) min_faves:100 lang:en",
  "order": "latest",
  "next_cursor": ""
}

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⏭ Next Steps

• How to Search Tweets — Technical documentation for the Search endpoint.
• Search for Mentions — Specialized guide for tracking brand activity.
• Sorsa Search Builder — Build your queries visually.