Searching for popular topics

#1

Hi guys,

I’m trying to search for tweets that contain popular hashtags in a certain area using the Search API. However, when I test this on the API console (https://dev.twitter.com/rest/tools/console) it doesn’t return any tweets in my city with a radius of 50mi. My query right now is just from Twitter’s website (#JFCShawnMendes). On Twitter, it says it’s popular in my area, but it’s not returning any tweets from my area. All the coordinates are set correctly. Is it possible to do this with the Twitter Search API or is there a reason this isn’t working?

Thank you

#2

The public Search API is not the same as the Search results available on Twitter.com, and in particular it does not index very new Tweets instantly, or anything older than 7 days. Additionally, only a very small percentage of Tweets are geotagged by the poster. So I’m not entirely surprised that you’re not seeing much from the public API in this case.

#3

So is there no way to do this with any of Twitter’s public API’s?

#4

You could potentially use the streaming API with a location filter for realtime results, but there’s no way to use the Search API for this. Gnip APIs would offer more comprehensive coverage.