Twitter lists are a great way to identify specialists or good content on any topic we are interested in, but Twitter itself doesn’t include a way to find them. Fortunately, we have Google to help us solve that issue.
These are the elements we have to take into consideration, and that will ultimately help us identify the lists we are looking for:
- We are targeting content published on Twitter. That means we only want Google to include results coming from there. We can do that using the filter site like this: site:twitter.com.
- We are trying to identify lists, and every Twitter list includes the word lists in the URL. We can’t just add it to the previous filter because the URLs always show the list owner’s username right after the domain name (for example, https://twitter.com/javierleiva/lists/edtech). So we could use site:twitter.com/javierleiva/lists if were only looking for lists that the user @javierleiva owns, but we will usually be looking for broader results so it’s better to use the filter inurl instead (inurl:lists).
- As we are looking for some specific topic, we need to include it in the search expression as well. Let’s say we want to find lists about cardiology. In that case, we will use the same filter as before (inurl) and specify the topic: inurl:cardiology. We could just add the topic to the previous filter (inurl:lists/cardiology), but then we would not be able to locate lists about cardiology whose names don’t start with that word (for example, https://twitter.com/mayocarenetwork/lists/mc-cardiology).
Now we have everything we need:
- site:twitter.com
- inurl:lists
- inurl:cardiology
And this is going to be our search expression:
site:twitter.com inurl:lists inurl:cardiology
Finally, here are some of the results:
Easy, right?
