Widget for #Search not Working

[lauramgamez]

I am trying to embed a widget for the search #TWGRefugees on my page but sometime is not working. When I do the search it is all there but when I use the widget maker it shows an empty timeline. I decided to try and embed it to the website anyway, and now on the website it shows me only the last tweet with the hashtag and doesn’t show the rest.

What is going on? Can anyone help me please?

[andypiper]

The search API and search widget only supports a 7 day search index. There is only one Tweet on that hashtag within a seven day window, so that is all the timeline can display.

[lauramgamez]

Thanks Andy for the prompt response!

Is there a way that the code can change to allow for a longer history window?

[andypiper]

The Twitter Search API has always been limited to 7 days, so this is not something that can be changed.

One alternative you could consider would be to create a collection of Tweets using the hashtag, and then embedding the collection. However, that would require manual curation of the timeline using something like TweetDeck.

[b_stansfield]

Hi Andy, I don’t know if this is totally accurate. I use a search widget with class pages as a way of collecting relevant tweets. I simply retweet them with the #tag and the search widget has always displayed a long scrollable list of these. Something has changed and the search widgets are no longer useful in education. Having to tweet something and then go into TweetDeck and manually drag across into a collection is both inefficient and not intuitive. What alternatives are there?

[andypiper]

Something has changed

Can you be specific about the change that you are seeing? There have been no recent changes to either the search widget or to the search API.

[b_stansfield]

Hi Andy, I had created a widget to search for a hash tag that I use to create a stream of tweets for various classes. This widget had always presented in the LMS as a scrollable list of tweets, going back further than 7 days. Now the same widgets show nothing except for the last 7 day tweets as you suggest. I hadn’t changed the widget but am now noticing that it is behaving differently. For the previous tweets to get back, the only thing I can think of is to manually create a collection. It would be great to be able to embed the result of a search as per searching with the twitter search bar.

[b_stansfield]

Because previously the widget displayed the results of a search for a #tag and this didn’t seem restricted by time, it was also possible for other members of the teaching team to harvest tweets using the agreed #tag into the stream. By having to use a collection, this is not easy as the collection is managed by an individual and tweets found by others have to be added manually by the collection owner

[andypiper]

I’m surprised to hear that previously this seemed to show Tweets further back than 7 days - the widgets have never supported more than that, as they sit on top of the search API which only has a 7 day index, and there have definitely been no recent changes in this area. Have you ever used a widget provided by another provider (i.e. not from Twitter settings / publish.twitter.com)? Third party widgets may well have cached older content.

In general we recommend curating timelines (collections) in this case, because you have much more control over what will be displayed in the widget - this avoids the unfortunate situations where hashtags can be targeted by spammers, and enables you to dictate exactly what will appear in the timeline. However, yes, as you said, there is an overhead in managing this.

[system]

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