What are the limitations on a Twitter saved search?
Asked by
Bellatrix (
21317
)
October 16th, 2011
I am trying to gather tweets on a range of topics, but it seems Twitter searches have a time limit (only go back so many days) or perhaps it is the number of tweets that limits the search.
If it is a very active search, the tweets collected only go back so far and then stop. Does anyone know why this is?
Sorry if I am being vague. I am trying to explain what I want to know as clearly as I can.
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4 Answers
Yeah, sometimes Twitter doesn’t go back more than a week. Other times, it returns the first 1500 results, however soon those are (so for Trending Topics, it might only go back 5 minutes, for terms less popular, it might go back a few months.)
Allow me to suggest Twitter Advanced Search, which goes back to 2008. Make sure to check out the special Twitter search operators, like “since:2009–02-15” or “until:2009–02-15”.
Thanks @Aethelflaed. I will check that out. I am using TwapperKeeper and it’s good but I am having to pay a subscription fee and it would be helpful to be able to use more than one method to gather this data.
Thanks again.
Yes, this is a known issue. Archive search (searching back more than a handful of days) is not currently a priority at Twitter, so unfortunately there’s no easy solution to this.
Depending what you’re doing, you can sometimes use the massive number of recent Tweets for interesting stuff.
I believe there are 3rd party sites that have large archives of Tweets that you may be able to search from (but I don’t think it’s free), but for now you can’t do what you want with Twitter search.
Thank you Ben. There WAS a 3rd party site where I could do this. They were bought out though. Can you design something in Twitter this week for me please :D (Joking… next week will be fine!).
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