Why are some tweets missing from API Search

davethegeek · 2016-03-09T19:20:07.971Z

First time posting here, So please be gentle on me!

I’m having some really annoying issues when fetching tweets using the API. It seems to be missing users tweets from the results, when i know the tweets are there.

I’ve also tried using this Java app to pull back historic tweets and still getting the same issue.

GitHub

Jefferson-Henrique/GetOldTweets-java

GetOldTweets-java - A project written in Java to get old tweets, it bypass some limitations of Twitter Official API.

an example would be when I fetch tweets for the hashtag #DCCComstorUAE . it misses out tweets by the user CharlieChakoo which i know exist. it has done this for my own script and for the Java app.

If I use the Java app to cross reference user and query, i search for DCCComstorUAE AND user CharlieChakoo, and it finds his tweets. So why would it not find them from just the hashtag.

The script i wrote is in PHP and it runs daily to fetch new tweets.

Would this be a twitter API error, or something wrong with the users account?

Thank you!

IgorBrigadir · 2016-03-09T20:48:46.667Z

No, doesn’t sound like an error - The Search API will only return results from the last 7 days at most. (It also doesn’t index EVERY single tweet - so sometimes tweets are not retrievable even though they exist) - The Search feature on the web interface is different to the Search API.

If you want to monitor #DCCComstorUAE over time - maybe the streaming API may be more appropriate: https://dev.twitter.com/streaming/reference/post/statuses/filter - using the filter stream you should be able to pick up every #DCCComstorUAE tweet as they arrive while you keep the connection open (but not back in time).