How to Search and Read Your Twitter Tweets

4 of 8 in Series: The Essentials of Getting Connected and Communicating on Twitter

You can see what you've tweeted on Twitter in several ways. To see a running list of your past tweets, start with your own Twitter profile. To do so, click Profile at the top to open your Profile page, and you see a feed of all your public tweets in reverse chronological order.

Your profile is a publicly accessible URL. For example, if your username is @dummies, navigate to http://twitter.com/dummies to jump directly to your Profile page.

If you're looking for a specific tweet, you can first look for it by using Twitter Search. Do a search for your username plus a keyword from the tweet. (If you have a common username, you may want to include the @ symbol.) The tweet you're looking for is most likely in the search results.

If you protect your updates, searching by using Twitter Search doesn't work because the tweets aren't indexed in the search engine.

You can also search for specific tweets by using Google or another search engine. Google tends to update its index against Twitter often and also offers advanced search terms so that you can focus the search. Additionally, Google's search interface lets you see who else is talking about your tweets, in addition to the tweets themselves.

Your public tweets on Twitter are indexed by search engines. You can delete your tweets on Twitter by clicking the Trash Can icon, but if you don't do it within a few seconds, Google and other search engines, as well as Twitter's own search tool, have already indexed those tweets. So, sometimes tweets are forever.