How to. . . track old tweets

If you use Twitter a lot, finding an old tweet can be difficult, if not impossible. Though there is no free search that can find everything, here are a few ways you may be able to find what you're looking for.

1. Twitter's search engine goes back one week. Use from:name or to:name to search for tweets from or to a particular person; #word to search for tweets with a specific hashtag; @name for tweets referencing a specific person; quotation marks around a group of words to find an exact phrase.

2. To go back more than one week, here are some free search sites: snapbird.org, topsy.com (goes back to 2008; click tweets and then Advanced Search); allmytweets.net (limited to 3,200 results); backtweets.com; tweetscan.com.

3. You also can start archiving tweets to make accessing them easier later on. Sign up (for free) with tweetbackup.com. You can easily export your last 3,200 posts into one of four formats that can then be searched. -- Ronnie Gill