Here’s a quick little post about a sweet new Twitter search tool that I think, if I were a cop, I’d find kind of handy. It’s called Searchtastic. There are many Twitter search tools available. But I haven’t found another with the combination of tools like Searchtastic, of which it seems law enforcement could make good use.

Try searching Twitter with its own advanced search “feature” and you might come up a bit disappointed. Put in a term or hashtag and it will take you go back only a week and a half or so in time.

With Searchtastic :

1. Search usernames or hashtags
2. You can pull up tweets from weeks and months back.
3. You can search on a particular user and the people he or she follows.
4. Then, click on a word in the search results and it modifies the search by the word. Once a word is in the search results, if you want to take it back out, click on it again.
5. And the clincher: When your search results look like something that might be interesting, export the results to Excel with the click of one button.

It seems like in ten or fifteen minutes, you could design a search, relevant to any investigation you might be working, that’s full of interesting terms and Twitter usernames. Export those results to Excel and cross reference them through your other database engines and maybe connect a few more dots. Useful?

Searchtastic is in beta. On the “About” page, they’re asking for your input. If you have a suggestion that might make the tool especially more useful to law enforcement, let them know. I’ve had a couple experiences where a developer actually made a modification based on my input. It could work. Follow them on Twitter: @Searchtastic