Performing a location-based Twitter search in TwInbox

When you do a Twitter serach using the website, you can use the “near:” operator to find tweets related to a particular location. For example, here is how you can look for a happy hour near One Market Street in San Francisco.

Unfortunately, the “near:” operator is not supported by the Twitter search API. So when you perform a search from TwInbox, or another Twitter client, you cannot use it. However, all is not lost. There is a relatively simple workaround. You can find coordinates of (geocode) the location you are looking for, and then use the “geocode:” search operator.

Step 1 – Geocode the location

Geocoding a location is very simple. Here is an article that shows how to find latitude and longitude of a location using Google Maps. Using that method you can determine that coordinates of One Market Street in San Francisco are 37.794108,-122.39511.

Step 2 – Configure a search

Using the coordinates, you can perform the search. For example, you can use Twitter website search.

Or you can configure a search in TwInbox:

TwInbox location-based search using geocode
TwInbox location-based search using geocode

 

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