Is Twitter's search function just erratic?
March 18, 2009 11:07 AM   Subscribe

I want to use Twitter as a medium to do some professional work, but for it to perform as desired I have to rely on search.twitter.com (or something similar, like twemes) to accurately compile all tweets with a given hashtag. But my own personal Twittering indicates that these search functions aren't reliable. What's the deal?

For instance, the Wisconsin Film Festival is coming up so I started tagging my related posts with #wff2009. One such tweet is here:

http://twitter.com/traineenews/status/1283585285

Searching for that tag brings up a bunch of results, and brings up even more if you exclude the #, but it doesn't include mine:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=wff2009

Twemes.com, meanwhile, has nothing, although that apparently requires the # to be the first character in the tweet in order to "tweme" it. Or whatever.

I want to correspond with Twitter users and find their responses by using hashtags that I share with them, and I don't want to miss anyone. Is this just a failure of Twitter's search function? Is there anything I could do to make, for instance, my wff2009 tweets show up in that search?
posted by blueshammer to Computers & Internet (5 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Was your feed public at the time you made the post? As far as I know, search.twitter works from a feed of all public tweets that gets indexed, rather than searching the database as it stands now. Nothing you've posted so far seems to be indexed by the search, which would be odd if you have always been public.

Asking at the dev group might get you a more informed answer.

(And fwiw #WFF seems to be a more popular hashtag...assuming those people are talking about the same thing)
posted by gregjones at 12:35 PM on March 18, 2009


Response by poster: Assuming that by public you mean unprotected, then yes, it's always been unprotected. I'll ask the dev group. Thanks.
posted by blueshammer at 1:08 PM on March 18, 2009


Given that Twitter itself isn't a reliable medium (yesterday multiple friends each had one or more tweets disappear, for good, apparently, within a few minutes of posting), anyone who is trying to index twitter is likely to have at least a few omissions.
posted by Good Brain at 1:34 PM on March 18, 2009


yesterday multiple friends each had one or more tweets disappear, for good, apparently, within a few minutes of posting

This happened to a friend of mine yesterday, too.

Then there's that whole problem whereby Twitter search indexes every tweet, even deleted ones. I wish the service were more reliable.
posted by limeonaire at 8:59 PM on March 18, 2009


By the way, to return to the original question about searching Twitter, although without any additional answers, I've had the same problem when trying to search for my username + a word or phrase I know is contained in one of my posts. Zero results, making it so I have to click back through my stream to try to find the original post.
posted by limeonaire at 12:44 PM on March 28, 2009


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