GET search/tweets return few results that what would be

[GMaxera]

Hello,
I’m trying to solve a problem using the search/tweets that return not all expected results.
Initially, I thought was about a not correct use of max_id parameter for paginate the results.
But after a series of test, I found that the REST API do not return all tweets that I expect and I don’t know why.

I just tried with a simple search where the query term is #blackops3 and I set the count to 100.
The search/tweets return only 71 tweets. And then, even if I try to do a next call with max_id equal to the 71th result returned, I got nothing in response.

Why ??
There is a huge (million probably) of tweets containing the #blackops3 tag.

Thanks,
Gianluca.

[andypiper]

From the documentation:

Before getting involved, it’s important to know that the Search API is focused on relevance and not completeness. This means that some Tweets and users may be missing from search results. If you want to match for completeness you should consider using a Streaming API instead.

In particular, the search index available via the API is limited to 7 days, and not all users will be indexed at all times.

[GMaxera]

I’m aware … but we are talking of millions of tweets missing.
If you try to search using twitter.com/search you will see there are more than 500 tweet in less than few hours.

So, I’m really shocked that the Rest API returns only the first 71 ones. And these 71 tweet are into a span time of just few hours. So, the 100th tweet or even the 500th tweet containing #blackops3 is till into the time span of 7 days.

I’m not looking for completeness … but reasonable results. Returning only 71 from millions of them is very far from reasonable. So, I would like to know why this happens.