Count # of tweets containing a given word in the last five minutes

[dwang1995]

Hi, I’m working with the Twitter API for the first time as part of a project my group is doing for a college course. As part of our project, we are hoping to be able to count the number of times a given word has been tweeted in the last five (or any small number of) minutes. Having looked into the matter online, we are under the impression that this was reasonably simple to do with V1.0, but that under V1.1, only the 100 most recent results for a given query will be returned. This is not an issue for uncommon words being searched, as we can just count the number of results provided that it is less than 100, but it becomes more complicated for popular or trending terms. Would anyone more experienced with V1.1 be willing to offer some words of advice on how we might approach this?

Thanks, Dan

[ePirat]

Best would be if you look into the streaming API. With it you should be able to do what you want, if I understood your question correctly. Just set a filter and you will get Tweets that contain a specific word/hashtag.
Note that the non-commercial version of the Streaming API only returns about 1% of all Tweets, if there are a lot of Tweets, like for Trending Topics, you can only get a few of them (still a lot).
More access to data is only provided through paid services.