We got so many great questions during the Twitter webinar that I presented last week (not surprising since we actually got within a few dozen of the maximum 1,000 simultaneous attendees allowed by Citrix GoToWebinar!) that I've decided to address selected ones via the blog.

Q:  You said that you can find people via their Twitter bios.  I've logged into Twitter and am searching (http://search.twitter.com) with keywords that I know are in certain people's bios, but their profiles are not coming up in my search results.  What's wrong?

A:  First, Twitter's built-in search is great for finding tweets with keywords, but not bios.  You need to use a major search engine that has near real-time indexing of Twitter, such as Google.  The Google query format for Twitter bios is

site:twitter.com "bio * KEYWORD"

where KEYWORD can be any keyword or boolean phrase, such as

site:twitter.com "bio * sourcing|sourcer"

Don't be discouraged if Google displays the "We're sorry" message on your initial results page.  Just enter the letters in the image challenge prompt and you will be taken to the actual search results.

Also don't feel satisfied by the amount of results displayed.  At the bottom of the first result page, click the link at the end of this paragraph:

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the ones already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included

This may reveal additional relevant results!  However, it is true that this won't return everyone's bio that should match.  Each search engine's algorithm spiders differently - and incompletely / imperfectly.  So it's also worth checking some of the dedicated Twitter directories to find people, as discussed during my webinar.

So thanks again to all who attended, and for those who missed it, remember that the recording will be offered on a complimentary basis for a limited time via http://aces.arbita.net/webinars/free-arbita-educational-webinar-series