Post by David Pierce. Find me on Twitter.

Finding people on Twitter can be tough – many people’s usernames (myself included) are different from their real names, and Twitter’s search isn’t the most helpful if you’re trying to figure out which David Pierce you’re trying to find on Twitter.

For that purpose, I use Tweepz, a great Twitter-extending people search engine. Tweepz searches through biographies, names, and usernames to figure out who it is that you’re really looking for.

Let’s say you search “David Pierce” to try and find me – Tweepz looks for all the people who’ve listed their name as David Pierce, and all those who have David Pierce in their biographies. You then get listings, complete with picture, bio, and website, of all the results Tweepz finds – making it easy to find the David Pierce you’re really looking for (the third one, if you’re looking for me).

Tweepz can search by location, by name, by specific text (great if you’re looking for like-minded Twitterers), or even hide a term if you really hate all people interesting in life-coaching.

I use Tweepz not only for names, but for people involved with interesting things. Let’s say I want to find all the TechCrunch writers on Twitter. Since they’re likely to have “TechCrunch writer” in their bio somewhere, by searching Tweepz for “TechCrunch,” I’m able to see a pretty comprehensive list of the TechCrunch people on Twitter. It works great for almost any company or organization you’re looking for, and makes it incredibly easy to connect with and follow a group or person you’re interested in.

You can sort the Tweepz results in a number of ways – by the number of followers a user has, by the number of people they’re following, or by when they got on Twitter. Narrow it even further if you want, by the language in which they primarily tweet or “Extracted Entities” – whatever those are.

Want to know when a new CNN anchor joins Twitter? You can create an RSS feed for a given search query, and be updated when it changes. You can also tweet search results easily from within the Tweepz interface.

Tweepz has made me realize how important my bio on Twitter really is – for many people, it’s the only thing they’ll know about you. Keep yours updated, and let Tweepz help me find you!

How do you find people on Twitter?