How to find your own tweets on Twitter

If you've ever wanted to look back on your prior Twitter history and find an old tweet, you know that finding posts from weeks or years past is much easier said than done.

SEE ALSO:  Now See Your Old Facebook Post

That's because until recently, Twitter didn't provide an easy way to search old posts. Sure, you could manually download your entire archive, but who wants to sift through thousands of tweets that way.Thanks to Twitter's recent search update, searching your own tweets on Twitter is now both fast and easy.You can use Twitter's newly revamped advanced search to search through any user's tweet history, provided the account is set to be publicly viewable. Begin by entering the Twitter handle (or handles) you want to search in the "from these accounts fields." Note that you don't need to include the @ sign before the user name.

From there, the rest of the fields will depend on what you're searching for and how specific you want to be. If I wanted to find every tweet I've ever sent about the San Diego Chargers, for example, I would type "chargers" into the "all of these words" field.

But you can also get a lot more specific in your queries by adding a date range, hashtags, @ mentions and other information to the search fields. Add dates to see tweets you sent during a specific time period. (Tip: if you can't remember the specific date you joined Twitter, your main profile displays the month and year you joined.)

You can also search by tweet location (if you've enabled location information in the past), retweets, and even specific types of tweets. The search will identify positive or negative tweets by searching for ":)" or ":(", for example.

Of course Twitter's search is still somewhat limited, though the company says it plans to expand the feature to be more comprehensive in the future. You can't search your direct messages or favorites, for example, though there are workarounds outside of Twitter. Snapbird, which requires users to log in with their Twitter credentials, allows you to search within your direct messages or tweets favorited by you or others.

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