Twitter Search Operators That No Longer Work

Some Twitter search operators no longer return useful results: filters for shut-down services such as Periscope and Vine find nothing new, location operators find few posts, and repost filters reach back only a few days. Most “broken” searches, though, are typing mistakes, such as lowercase or, a space after the colon, or min_likes: instead of min_faves:.

This page separates operators that are gone, operators that changed, and mistakes that only look like broken operators. The operators that work are in the Twitter advanced search operators reference.

Which Twitter Search Operators Are Gone?

Operators tied to services X shut down still parse, but they have nothing new to find. Listed below are the operators to stop using.

Operator	Why it no longer helps	Use instead
filter:periscope	Periscope shut down in 2021	filter:native_video
filter:vine	Vine shut down in 2017	filter:native_video
:) and :( attitude searches	Sentiment search was removed from X search	Collect posts and score sentiment yourself

Scoring sentiment on collected posts is covered in how to collect tweets for sentiment analysis.

Which Twitter Search Operators Work Differently Now?

These operators still work, but their results changed, so searches built on old behaviour return less than expected. Listed below are the 4 operators (twitter-advanced-search reference).

Operator	What changed	Workaround
near:, within:, geocode:	X phased out exact coordinates for ordinary posts and kept them only for photos, so few posts match	Search the place name as a keyword, or add lang:
filter:nativeretweets, include:nativeretweets	Return reposts from only about the last 7 to 10 days	Search the original author with from:
filter:verified	Verification on X changed in 2023, so the set of matching accounts changed too	filter:blue_verified for paid verification
Count filters above about 1,000	min_faves: and similar counts are approximate at high numbers	Use thresholds as rough floors

Location searches still run in apidojo’s actors when posts carry location data; the documentation includes a near: example (Apify).

Which Twitter Operators Never Worked That Way?

Many searches fail because of operators that look plausible but were never part of X web search. Listed below are the 6 most common mistakes.

You typed	What happens	Correct form
min_likes:100	Not a web search operator	min_faves:100
cats or dogs	or is searched as a word	cats OR dogs
from: NASA	The space breaks the operator	from:NASA
from:@NASA	Extra @ sign	from:NASA
since:2024-6-1	Date not in YYYY-MM-DD form	since:2024-06-01
cats AND dogs	AND is searched as a word	cats dogs (space means AND)

The min_faves: family is covered in how to search tweets by likes, reposts and replies, and OR in how to search multiple keywords on X with OR.

Do X API Operators Work in X Search?

No, X API operators such as is:retweet, has:links and is:verified belong to the developer API, and X web search uses its own forms: filter:retweets, filter:links and filter:verified. The X API’s operators are documented separately (X API docs), and the two sets are compared in the Twitter search API guide.

How Do You Test Whether an Operator Works?

Test an operator by searching it alone with one common word, then adding your other filters one at a time. If cats filter:images returns results and your full query doesn’t, the problem is another part of the query. A single query holds about 22 operators before X stops applying them (twitter-advanced-search reference). Long queries are built step by step in how to build complex Twitter search queries.