Digital Marketing

Twitter: Using Google Custom Search Strings to Find People to Follow

Ever wonder how to use the power of Google to find people to follow on Twitter? Look at this custom search string. I wish I could take credit for figuring it out, but I can’t.

While browsing Twitter, I came across a tweet that had the following Google search string:

site: twitter.com bio location tx 100 … 1,000,000 followers -400

Unfortunately, I don’t remember who originally posted this.

If you find this article please let me know so I can give it proper credit. Having said that, let’s take a closer look at what that search string does.

Here’s the breakdown:

“site: twitter.com” Says search on the site twitter.com

“bio location tx” Tells the search engine to look in the “bio” section for the location of “tx”, also known as Texas.

“100 … 1000000 followers” Says finding people who have between 100 and 1 million followers

“-400” is a code that tells the search engine to exclude certain words from the result. It is automatically added to the string when you press the “search” button. I don’t know or understand why, it just is.

This little snippet of “-400” might come in handy if you want to exclude people with the phrase “make money online” or “look at my photos” or something like that on your profile. I’m not saying you should, I’m just pointing out that the option is there.

In case you didn’t guess, the string is for an advanced Google search. Most people never use the advanced search feature, but it’s there for the taking. Every once in a while, I come across something like this and I remember why I think the big G is cool.

For fun, I suggest you run this search in your own city and see who shows up. I found a lot of cool people to keep using that little search string, you might as well. Let me know if this works for you in the comments.

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