Use of brackets in search queries

mossy2100 · 2012-11-15T11:09:07.000Z

Hi

I am currently working on software for the Australian government that queries search engines and twitter to find latest news items about animal and plant diseases.

I’m writing to ask if brackets are supported in Twitter search expressions, i.e. within the ‘q’ parameter for the REST callback https://api.twitter.com/1.1/search/tweets.json.

For example, we might submit a query to Google or Bing such as: (dead OR sick OR disease) (prawn OR shrimp)

Would this work with the twitter search? Or are the brackets simply ignored? If so, does it even matter? (On Google it doesn’t, but on Bing it does because the operator precedence is different. On Bing, the query “dead OR sick OR disease prawn OR shrimp” is interpreted as “dead OR sick OR (disease AND prawn) OR shrimp”.)

Thank you - any assistance is greatly appreciated,
Shaun

mossy2100 · 2012-11-15T11:20:41.000Z

I think I answered my own question. Assuming that the Twitter search operators supported by the search box on twitter.com are the same as those for the REST API, brackets ARE supported in search expressions.

For example, I get distinctly different results for ‘(cat fish) OR dog’ vs. ‘cat fish OR dog’.