What does recent mean?

[RichardJECooke]

Hi. What exactly does the search type ‘recent’ mean?

If I search with the criteria (200 max tweets, recent) will I get the latest 200 tweets?
Or only 100 tweets if 100 of them are older than some secret time Twitter considers not recent, like a day old?

[episod]

The search index served by the API goes back as far as a week, though it varies depending on the quantity of tweets that occurred recently.

[RichardJECooke]

I still don’t understand how this works. I put in max count of tweets as 300 and search for ‘news’ every 10 seconds. It returns 83, 78, 100, tweets at a time. Surely every single request should bring back 300 tweets?