Search is integrated in Twitter: what's new?

We've been working hard on bringing the search.twitter.com experience right into your sidebar.  You can now search for anything on Twitter, and see real time results immediately. Save searches that you know you'll repeat, and use Twitter to discover what's happening in the world, right now!  Several exciting search features make it easier to find interesting things on Twitter.

Search in your sidebar

Under your usual sidebar options, you'll now see the search box.  Enter any word, city, location, or search operator to find tweets about things that interest you!

Try typing in Wolverine to see latest movie reviews before checking it out.  If you want to get fancy, try typing search operators directly into the search box.  For example, near:"san francisco" within:5mi shows you tweets from everyone within 5 miles of San Francisco! 

Saved Searches

If you think you'll search for something more than once, why not save it? Clicking on the link of a saved search will show you a view of all real time tweets!  You can save up to 10 searches, which are easily removable- just click the red x next to "remove this saved search."

Click the Saved Searches tab to show or hide your saved searches.

Trending Topics

With the new search integration comes a new tab for trending topics, which lists the top 10 topics people all over the world are tweeting about.  Click the Trending Topics tab to show or hide the topics.

Collapsible Following bar

If you have a lot of saved searches, or you'd like to see trends instead of your following mosaic, you can now hide the photo grid of people you follow by clicking on the Following tab in the side bar.

RSS feeds for search queries

Add a query for a favorite search to your feed reader to see certain tweet searches without logging into Twitter!  Click "rss feed for this query" to grab the feed and add it to your favorite feed reader!

So...do you like it?

Leave your comments below and tell us what you think!

We're here to help (but do please help yourself)

Welcome to your Twitter Support homepage.  From here, you can access help articles, read about known issues, and find out what kinds of questions other people on Twitter have asked.  We encourage you to help yourself; Twitter is a free service, and while we try to provide as much help as we can, we can't get to every email.

A small team of 7 people strive to help as many people as possible each day, especially folks with broken accounts.  If it takes awhile to get a response, please be patient, and try searching the help resources for the answer to your question. If we haven't been able to answer your question in a timely manner, we'll let you know. 

Who are we?  Caroline, Mark, Del, Andrea, Charles, Keerthi and Crystal- follow us on Twitter, we're here to help!  

Having problems? Please check the Known Issues pages and the Status Blog before submitting a request to see if we already know about it-- we track new cases in the comments there, so you can add comments of your own.

Using Help Resources

Twitter's help resources are always accessible in the sidebar of your Support home page. 

• Getting Started New to Twitter?  Check out our Getting Started articles to get a feel for the basics. If you can't find what you're looking for, try using the search box.  
• Known Issues Find out what problems or bugs affect Twitter people today
• Trouble Shooting Check out common problems, and how to resolve them
• Terms of Service and Rules and Policies Use our Rules and Policies section to learn about what Twitter does about Spam, Impersonation, Trademark, Copyright and other Terms of Service or Rules violations, and find out what you need to do to resolve a violation.

Want to contribute?

We've got some of the basics but if there is something you'd like to see that's not here yet, we'd love to hear your feedback about making help as helpful as possible.  If you've written or created something helpful about using Twitter and posted it your website, blog, or elsewhere, let us know!  Submit a feedback ticket with a link and we'll check it out.

Twitter suspends account for suspicious activity.  Suspended accounts are researched by our Spam/Abuse or Support team.  One or more of these things may cause an account to be suspended:

Technical abuse of the Twitter Service

• unauthorized scripting of the site
  
• unauthorized serial account creation
• unauthorized mass account creation

Spam investigation

Publishing, posting or sending unsolicited email, junk mail, “spam”, chain letters, promotions, or advertisements for products or services (except where expressly permitted) is against the Terms of Service.  Commercial or promotional use of Twitter is allowed, and we do welcome feed-based accounts. Many companies create valuable, opt-in relationships with people on Twitter.  It's important to us, however, that the Twitter community receives only the content they'd like to receive.  The following behaviors may cause an account to get flagged for spam investigation and/or suspension:

• user name squatting
• account contains links pointing to phishing sites, malware, or other harmful material
• an account is identified as belonging to a group of spam accounts

• a large number of people block the profile in question
  
• a large number of people write in with spam complaints for a specific profile
• aggressive following (a large number of people are followed in a short amount of time)
• extremely imbalanced follower/following ratio
  

• updates consist of duplicate or repeating links and/or text
• updates consist mainly of links and not personal updates
• links in updates disguise the real content of a link given in a misleading or deceptive way.
  
• unauthorized "re-tweets" (poaching and posting other users' updates) passed off as original content*
  

If one or more the items listed above is true for any Twitter profile, we may suspend the account for abuse investigation and hide the contents from the public view in order to remove the cause of complaint. If you think you've been wrongly suspended, please send an email to suspended@twitter.com with the user name and reason why the account shouldn't be suspended.

Terms of Service violations

As stated in the Terms of Service, Twitter reserves the right to immediately terminate accounts without further notice if the account is in violation of the Terms of Service.  If your account is suspended however, we're most likely researching an issue with the account. If this is the case, you'll most likely have heard from our Support team. The following problems fall under Terms of Service violations:

• Copyright Infringement (To file a complaint, see our copyright infringement procedure here.)
• Impersonation
• Violence and/or specific threats
• Unlawful use
• Privacy infringement
  
• Trademark Infringement

Send all non-copyright Terms of Service complaints to terms@twitter.com.

Contact terms@twitter.com for questions or complaints regarding the Terms of Service. Contact suspended@twitter.com if your account has been suspended.

Find your friends and make some new ones

Twitter is more fun with friends. Now that you're twittering, find new friends or follow people you already know to get their twitter updates too. You can find your friends using people search, Twitter search, address book import, or URL look up.

Find People by name

Use Twitter's people search to find people who currently use Twitter.  Search for a first, last, or user name as a starting point, and see what comes up. We use the full name as well as the user name fields to give you as many relevant results as possible.

To use people search, click on the 'Find People' link in the top navigation bar, and select the 'Find on Twitter' tab. If you don't find who you're looking for, dig deeper using some of the options suggested in the sidebar.

Find people using keywords, location, interests, and more!

A tiny, hidden gem lies in Twitter's footer navigation bar: Twitter Search!  Twitter search is an incredible tool that allows you to find virtually anything and anyone by adding the ability to search for key words, locations, phrases, and more!  Type in any word and you're guaranteed to get real time results.  

• Want to know what people think of a new movie?  Try searching for it.  
  
• Search for any phrase ('I dreamt' is an interesting one)
  
• Want to know what people are saying about your company? Try a keyword search.
• Wondering who sends tweets from your area? Try searching for 'location:cityname' to see a list of people who are from that city.

The results you get from Twitter show what people are saying and doing right now!  

You can translate foreign language updates into English, filter by language, post a Twitter update linking to interesting search results, and even subscribe to search results (this is like tracking keywords, but on the web!)   

We also keep track of the most popular topics, called "trending topics"  so you'll always know what people are excited about.

But that's not all: check out Advanced Search to do some truly amazing things, like find people within 15 miles of a given location, find updates by positive or negative connotation, find updates to a certain person or from a certain person, or even updates within a specified time period.

Find people on other networks

We can check a list of your contacts to see if any of them are currently using Twitter.  You can check address books from Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, MSN, and AOL.  (We'll support more networks in the future!)  We'll show you who is on Twitter and you can choose to follow them if you want to get their Twitter updates.

To import an address book, visit the Find People link.  The tab is already selected for you, just type in your email address and password.  Note: Twitter doesn't save your email log in information, we only use it once to get permission to view your contacts list. 

Twitter, Help! 

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