Twitter's default search only goes back a week-if that-and often chokes on multiple keyword searches. Fortunately, there ARE many great alternatives, and I've included a chart comparing the nine top tweet search engines below. Here are links to each of the nine, in order of what I've found most useful to least useful for general tweet searches (however, some are powerful in other ways)):
...search by geographical location, by language, by date, by attitude (positive, or negative), by search questions asked; create an rss feed of results you'd like to track--or auto-tweet.
Cool article on twitter tools and plug ins for twitter. These help us see into what can be done with twitter, the cool tool that is really a customized, unique search engine of people.
TweetGrid is a powerful Twitter Search Dashboard that allows you to search for up to 9 different topics, events, converstations, hashtags, phrases, people, groups, etc in real-time. As new tweets are created, they are automatically updated in the grid. No need to refresh the page!
Real-time Twitter search with feelings using insanely complex sentiment analysis. For best results: Search for popular movies, celebrities, tv shows and companies.
You search for a url, Twitter name, phrase or hashtag. TweetReach analyzes the tweets that match your search.TweetReach reports the reach and exposure data for those tweets.
A StreamGraph is shown for the latest 1000 tweets which contain the search word. The default search query is 'data visualization' but a new one can be typed into the text box at the top of the application.
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[TwitterRadar] Un autre moteur de recherche pour les tweets, Topsy vous permet de rechercher les occurences de votre mot clé recherché qui peut étre votre identifiant Twitter ou toute autre recherche. Topsy vous soumet le résultat par fraicheur mais aussi et surtout il vous donne sur la colonne de gauche le nombre de résultat sur le dernier mois, la dernière semaine, le dernier jour et la dernière heure (utile en cas d'événement majeur)
Share & discuss any topic with TwinglyTwingly is a powerful group communication and microblogging tool in the era of the realtime web. Share, discuss and have fun with friends, colleagues, strangers and others interested in the same topics as you.
Tweetcaster is receiving some notice for the ability to drill through search results. While hootsuite and bufferapp remain some power tools for me on my ipad, this cute little app is free and is worth a try.