Has Twitter search become markedly worse lately?

April 20, 2018 1:25 PM

I used to be able to pretty reliable find past tweets from particular users using the "searchterm from:username" format. Now I have to use Google search to find anything but very recent results. Have they started limiting historical access? Take @realDonaldTrump tweeting about Anna Wintour. "Wintour from:realDonaldTrump" returns nothing, when he's tweeted about her quite a few times.
posted by cichlid ceilidh to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Response by poster: I should add that the problem remains even when I explicitly add in date ranges. This is all from the main desktop web interface.
posted by cichlid ceilidh at 1:26 PM on April 20, 2018

I got plenty of results for your linked search, so it may be a problem on your end. Are you using the regular Twitter.com or a different client?
posted by acidic at 1:47 PM on April 20, 2018

Response by poster: This is on Twitter.com. Bizarrely, I only have the problem in Chrome and not Firefox. After resetting my Chrome settings and disabled all extensions, I still see "No results for wintour from:realdonaldtrump".
posted by cichlid ceilidh at 2:11 PM on April 20, 2018

Works for me both logged in and not, both Chrome and Firefox on Windows. Does it happen in a Chrome Incognito window? Any chance you blocked Trump on whatever account you're logged in to Chrome as?

To answer the broad question, no Twitter search seems as good as it has for awhile now. I wouldn't be surprised by a transitory error where one of their search servers was offline briefly or something, but no persistent problems I've seen. Another possible guess, an SSL certificate problem on one (and only one) frontend server. The Javascript console might tell you more.
posted by Nelson at 2:28 PM on April 20, 2018

Response by poster: It happens in incognito and when logged out. I don't have him blocked (though it would probably up my sanity). It's been going on for at least two weeks now. Nothing weird in the JS or network console.
posted by cichlid ceilidh at 3:07 PM on April 20, 2018

When you're in Chrome, hit F12, do the search again, then look at the 'console' tab in the F12 debug window -- if it shows text in red, Chrome isn't handling something in Javascript. My guess is you have a bad *.js file cached; clear your Chrome cache through Chrome's settings.
posted by AzraelBrown at 8:23 AM on April 22, 2018