Search for tweets with a phrase but excluding that phrase if it's within a URL

Question

I'm trying to search for tweets that talk about NPR, but because Twitter searches the full text of URLs, my results include every tweet that links to NPR.org (a lot!). How can I search for tweets that mention "NPR", but exclude tweets that ONLY have NPR in the context of an npr.org URL?

Answer 1

In my quick tests, npr -npr.org seems to work pretty well. There's definitely a difference between that and just npr. With the latter I do see links to npr.org, but none if I exclude it.

Of course, I'd also expect that to exclude tweets where someone has simply put npr.org in their text, but that may just be a side-effect you'll have to live with.

More information: Twitter Help: Using Advanced Search