5 best ways to do a Twitter search without account in 2024
Shehriar Awan●
May 13, 2024
●
11 min read
I was scrolling through Reddit when I found this old post in my timeline. 👇
It triggered my inner content enthusiast, eagerly searching for a fascinating topic.
But is it just me and mr. r/rolojnr1 or there are other people wondering – Is it possible to browse Twitter anonymously? 🤔
Turns out there are 16k+ people in the world who want to know how to browse Twitter without an account.
So let’s answer this question. In this article, we’ll learn 5 working methods to do Twitter search without an account.
But why’d you need to view Twitter without an account?
Why view Twitter without a Twitter account?
Social media platforms ask for a lot of information when we create an account. Not many want to share their personal information.
The main reasons of browsing social media platforms like Twitter without signing up include:
- Anonymity: Search without being identified.
- Privacy: Browse without sharing personal info.
- Research: Gather info and public opinions.
- News: Discover news, trends, and hashtags.
But does Twitter still track you even if you don't create an account?
Does Twitter track you if you don't have an account?
The short answer is – Yes. Twitter can still track your activity on its platform even if you don’t create an account.
Platform’s privacy policy clearly tells you what data they collect about you when you use Twitter.
But you can tackle this using VPN, private browsers, and other techniques.
Now let’s move to the question of the day – Is it possible to browse twitter without an account?
Is it possible to do Twitter search without account?
Again, the short answer is Yes. We can browse Twitter without an account but to a limited extent.
Before July 2023, Twitter made it easy to search, use advanced search, and explore without logging in.
However, after the July update, they've moved these features behind a login wall.
During my research, I came across some solutions that claimed to bypass the login requirement, but sadly, they didn't quite work as promised.
These methods include:
- Using Twitter search bar and advanced search
- Using custom Twitter search URL
- Using Twitter guest mode
Many articles online mention Twitter explore page, search bar, and Twitter advanced search as best ways to search Twitter without an account.
But if you go to
https://twitter.com/explorehttps://twitter.com/search-advancedSimilarly, Twitter has discontinued the guest account option. Now you can not login as a guest to use Twitter.
Now let’s move to 5 methods that actually work.
5 best ways to do a Twitter search without account
After trying different ways to browse Twitter anonymously, I found these methods working better than others.
1. Nitter
Under the post that triggered me to write this piece, I found multiple comments about Nitter.
What is Nitter?
Nitter is an alternative front-end client for Twitter. It’s arguably the most popular Twitter viewer available online.
Nitter is free, open-source, and comes with a lot of cool features.
- Doesn't require a login
- Allows users to view and search tweets
- Has no ads or tracking
- Has a simple, classic layout
- Shows tweets in chronological order
- Has community-contributed mobile apps and browser extensions
- Has search filters like Twitter
But after Twitter’s rate cap update, Nitter started suffering.
With new API updates and limits on viewing tweets, Nitter started dying.
Is Nitter dead?
Yes, Nitter is officially dead now. In February 2024, the developers stopped working on the project.
The founder officially announced it in a comment on an issue opened on Nitter’s Github.
The status page that used to track the uptime and health of Nitter instances also reported the same.
Nitter relied heavily on mass generation of guest accounts to fetch data from Twitter.
With Twitter discontinuing this feature and enforcing rate limit on API and reading tweets, Nitter had no other option except shutting down.
But as I mentioned, Nitter is an open source project. So is it really dead?
Does nitter still work?
Unfortunately, Nitter is no longer functional in its original form. The official publicly available instances are no longer working.
But there is a possible workaround.
You can set up your own instance of Nitter by self-hosting it. This would require using your own Twitter account credentials.
Alternatively, you can use 3rd party Nitter services. There are hundreds of unofficial Nitter instances hosted online.
But there are some problems with these 3rd party instances.
- They are not online all the time
- They get rate limited
You can check out the status page to know which instance is up and running along country, RSS, latency, and Nitter version.
2. Fritter
Similar to Nitter, Fritter is also an open source Twitter front-end client. It lets you browse Twitter content without needing a Twitter account and keeps your data private.
Fritter offers a mobile app that is too similar to Twitter’s official app but more privacy-friendly and simple. It comes with a ton of features.
- Local data storage, no tracking
- Group and follow accounts
- No account required
- Save and group tweets
- Search tweets and accounts
- View worldwide trends and poll results
To browse Twitter without an account using Fritter, all you need to do is download the app and well… browse – just like we do in the Twitter app.
But unlike Twitter's official app and Nitter, you can not do an advanced search.
Fritter has its own set of limitations.
- Limited search features
- Lots of bugs
- No web or iOS version
- Crashes frequently
For stable and up to date experience, you can use SQuacker.
SQuacker is forked from Fritter. It is updated frequently and crashes less often.
3. Using Google search
This one is my favorite method. I also covered it in my Twitter advanced search guide.
Since tweets are publicly available, Google indexes them. This means you can view tweets without logging in to Twitter using Google search.
To search Twitter using Google, we can use the site search operator. The process is super easy.
- Go to google.com and type your query in the search bar.
- Now after the query, add site:twitter.com and hit enter.
- To get tweets containing your exact query, enclose it in single or double quotes.
To further narrow your query, you can use Google's advanced search operators.
To view tweets mentioning the keyword ‘Elon Musk’, we can use the allintext operator.
This will give us all tweets that contain our targeted keyword.
But what if I need to view tweets by Elon Musk in Google search?
To do that, we can simply paste the profile URL in the site operator.. This will narrow down our search to Elon’s own tweets only.
But these are random tweets. I can see them by visiting the profile too.
What if I want the latest tweets?
How to view the latest tweets of a Twitter user without a Twitter account?
We can use the Tools option on the top right side of our Google search page.
- Click the tools option
- From the tools menu, click on Any time.
- Select time or provide a custom date range.
But what if I want to see tweets by Elon, containing specific keywords?
We can add the allintext operator with the search term, followed by site operator with profile URL.
Tada!!!
There’s a lot more to Google search operators that we’ll explore in some other article.
You can also export all these search results to your Excel or Google Sheet without manual effort. How?
- Sign up to Lobstr.io
- Launch Google Search Scraper
- Add your Google SERP (search engine results page) URL
- Schedule to extract latest tweets
- Export automatically to Google Sheets
I have explained this in a detailed how to article. Check out How to Scrape Google Search Results for Free [2024 Edition].
But even Google search has limitations.
- You can’t view more than 500 results in Google SERPs
- You can’t search daily trending topics using Google search
Now let’s move to our next method.
4. Using Twitter RSS feed
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It's a way for users to stay updated with frequently changing content on websites.
Does Twitter have an RSS feed?
No, Twitter itself does not offer native RSS feeds anymore.
Twitter used to allow users to subscribe to RSS feeds for specific users and hashtags. It was discontinued after changes in their API.
How to create a Twitter RSS feed?
You can use third-party tools to create your own RSS feed for Twitter. I usually use RSS.APP for creating custom RSS feeds.
For Twitter, it offers a range of features not found in any other RSS app.
- Create multiple RSS feeds to follow specific topics
- Get real-time notifications on slack, telegram, and discord
- Content filtering with whitelist and blacklist
- RSS feed customization
- Get embed code for website
- Combine multiple RSS feeds into a single "super feed"
Creating your customized RSS feed with RSS.app is easy. Simply paste a Twitter URL and it’ll generate the feed for you.
You can get custom feeds for search results, hashtags, and even Twitter accounts. Plus there are ready-made feeds of Twitter influencers to save.
Though there are not a lot of limitations but RSS App can be expensive. Unlike other solutions I covered above, RSS App is not free.
You can only see around 10 tweets for free. The platform does offer a free 7-days trial to test the service.
Even with its most expensive plan, the platform offers only 1000 tweets per feed.
This brings us to the best solution to view Twitter being anonymous.
5. Use a burner account
None of the methods we explored above help you access Twitter’s all features. The easiest solution is creating a burner account.
A burner account in simple words means – creating a dummy account.
Can you use a pseudonym on Twitter?
Yes, Twitter allows you to use a pseudonym on its platform to hide your identity. You can have multiple accounts on Twitter too.
By creating a burner account, you can access all features of Twitter while protecting your privacy.
You can view Twitter profiles, their latest tweets, explore Twitter trending topics, interact with not only public accounts but also with private Twitter accounts.
How to create a burner account on Twitter?
It’s like creating a real account but with dummy details. To protect your personal email, use an expendable mail.
You can use made-up names and fun bios.
Just make sure you’re not impersonating anyone. Twitter has a strict Misleading and deceptive identities policy.
To avoid impersonations, you can explicitly mention that it’s a dummy account.
You can also sync your burner account to powerful tools like Lobstr.io and get the most out of Twitter using no-code automations.
All other methods we explored above lack one key element – the ability to import Twitter data to a Google Sheet (except the Google search one).
By syncing your burner account to Lobstr, you can extract all user tweets data into a Google Sheet without any manual effort in 4 simple steps.
- Launch Twitter User Tweets Scraper
- Sync your burner account
- Add profile username or URL
- Export all tweets to GSheet with 25 key data points
Furthermore, use a VPN to connect to Twitter, if you don’t want to share your IP address.
FAQs
How can I perform a Twitter hashtag search without signing up for an account?
Yes, you can perform a hashtag search using any of the methods discussed in this article e.g. RSS feed, Google search, or using Twitter front-end clients.
How do I perform Twitter advanced search without signing up?
You can use the burner account to access advanced search features. You can also use Nitter’s advanced search functionality.
How to view Twitter media without an account?
You can use Google search to view Twitter media without an account.
- Go to Google search
- Type “your query” site:twitter.com
- Now go to images
This will show you all images related to your query published on Twitter. Unfortunately you can’t view videos without login.
Conclusion
That’s a wrap on 5 best methods to search Twitter without an account. Most of these methods are free to try.
Do check out our no-code Twitter scrapers to automate your Twitter data extraction. You can view detailed how-to guides about Twitter scraping on our blog.
Shehriar Awan Self-proclaimed Head of Content @ lobstr.io. I write all those awesome how-tos, listicles, and (they deserve) troll our competitors.
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