Twitter – How to Turn Off Retweets from Followed Persons

Edit:

Twitter deprecated Twitter API v.1. So this info is also deprecated now. You can access the same api by using the URL https://api.twitter.com/1.1/search/tweets.json. Though this endpoint does not seem to be identical to the previous endpoint outlined before.

See Twiter API documentation for details.

Original Text:

As far as I know Twitter Search API is the best thing we've got as of now. And Twitter Search API supports searching timeline of any user. In fact "Search" text box of Twitter (at the top of Twitter page) uses the search API, so you can experiment using that search box.

For example searching

twitter from:yourusername

shows your tweets with word twitter .

You can use the same query for searching from your timeline, or from any users timeline. An API call identical to the example query would be

http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=twitter%20from%3Ayourusername

Note that Twitter Search API has some limitations. They are discussed at Twitter Search API Documentation.

For searching tweets from a list, I am not aware of a quick solution. You can always use

https://api.twitter.com/1/lists/members.json?slug=listname&owner_screen_name=yourusername

to get list members and construct a query manually by using the OR keyword as:

http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=twitter%20from%3Auser1%20OR%20from%3Auser2

To go directly to the "All" tab, you can create the search URL yourself like so:

https://twitter.com/search?f=realtime&q=stackexchange&src=typd

Where stackexchange is your search query and f=realtime is the equivalent of selecting the "All" tab.

You can try adding exclude:retweets to your search query but I'm not 100% sure how that works as it seems to not include tweets that have been retweeted. Another strategy is to simply do "-RT" in your search query to weed out some retweets.