Professional Twitter® Development With Examples in .NET 3.5

Chapter 4. The Twitter Search API

"The Twitter Search API is pretty useful — you can search on complex terms, filter by date ranges, and return the results as an RSS feed. Also good — it pretty much never goes offline [insert your own joke about the fail whale here]. We used it to pull relevant tweets to display in a Silverlight client for the PDC08 and MIX09 web sites.

Although search.twitter.com-never seems to go offline, you do have to watch out for latency, especially during peak events. We saw latency of 10 to 15 minutes during MIX09, which might have had to do with the fact that SXSW was going on at the same time."

—Jon Galloway, Witty

This chapter dives into the Search API, explores its similarities and differences with the REST API, goes into detail about search operators and parameters, and offers recommendations for how to best construct your search queries and handle incoming results from the API.

Overview

Today, Twitter's search functionality is contained within a distinct and separate API that is behaviorally inconsistent with the REST API, but offers simple and powerful real-time search capabilities. The look into the history behind the fracture of Twitter's API into two distinct offerings reveals that Summize, a "conversational search engine" company in Virginia, was acquired by Twitter and its API was migrated to http://search.twitter.com. It offers very few resource methods compared to the REST API, but the power of search lies in the speed it has to index real-time ...