Adam Green
Twitter API Consultant
adam@140dev.com
781-879-2960
@140dev

Search API

Twitter Search API programming

Learn how to aggregate tweets for any keywords with the Twitter search API. Complete details on programming with PHP and MySQL.

A continual question on the Twitter developer mailing list is why certain tweets and even entire accounts don’t show up in search results. The standard answer is that the search API filters out tweets that don’t meet a minimum quality threshold. That makes a lot of sense, and should definitely be done, if it returns […]

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Search API: More secret search operators

by Adam Green on November 26, 2013

in Search API

Last week I pointed out the undocumented search operator min_retweets. I’ve been searching tweets about this operator (yes, that is pretty meta) and found two more operators that aren’t in the official docs: min_replies and min_faves. You’ll have to experiment with these to see which are best for different needs. Before we get into the […]

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A common question asked by potential clients is how many tweets they can expect to get from the search API. Although I have been telling them “1,500 tweets up to 7 days old” for years, I decided to confirm that. To my surprise, the limit is no longer provided in the official docs. I tried […]

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Twitter search has been steadily improving since it was acquired from Summize in 2008. At first it returned tweets in a different format from the rest of the API, and had other integration problems, but Twitter has been working on it steadily. I’m writing a book on search API programming, and the first step is […]

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Exceeding the search API rate limit

by Adam Green on December 10, 2011

in Search API

We recently built a cool site called This R That for a client. Besides having a great UI that my son, Zach, built, it also has a neat architecture for a Twitter search site. The major weakness of the Twitter search API is that rate limiting is based on the IP making the request. While […]

Twitter bought the code for the search API when they acquired Summize, and while it did give them a fast search, I get the feeling they aren’t too happy about the quality of the code. The biggest hint is that they never fix it. The best example is the documented bug about the search API […]

I just finished a tutorial on the two methods of searching for tweets. Whenever this subject comes up on the Twitter developers mailing list, the usual response is that the streaming API is best, but that depends on your goals and programming ability. If you want to search for tweets in the past, or if […]