Question about date format

[ecooper]

Hi,

I'm a bit confused about the date format - when I search from the Topsy "advanced search" web interface and specify a date and time range, e.g. September 22 from 6pm-7pm, the time boxes say "PST" next to them, but the results that get returned appear to be from 6-7pm EST, my own time zone.  Then, if I look at the mintime and maxtime values in the URL, they are mintime=1316728800&maxtime=1316732400 which convert to Thu, 22 Sep 2011 22:00:00 GMT and Thu, 22 Sep 2011 23:00:00 GMT respectively, which are 5pm and 6pm EST, not 6pm and 7pm EST as the search result tweets are actually from.  This would make sense if I was searching for recent tweets since Daylight Savings started, but not for searching for tweets from back in September.  How does this work / is this documented anywhere?

Thanks

[vanessa]

Hi, I can't seem to reproduce what you are talking about.

Firstly, for the date you specified, 9/22/2011, daylight savings was in effect (it went from 3/13 to 11/6 in 2011), so EDT was in effect, and was indeed -04:00 GMT (so 6-7pm EDT is correct).

Also, when I do a search for 9/22/2011 6pm - 7pm (PST), I get the following min and maxtime: mintime=1316739600&maxtime=1316743200

which convert correctly to 6-7pm Pacific with the daylight savings taken into account:

Thu Sep 22 2011 18:00:00 GMT-7 and Thu Sep 22 2011 19:00:00 GMT-7

Hope this helps. Please sent me links, examples, screenshots if you see inconsistencies with this. Thanks, vh

[Erica Cooper]

ok, right, I forgot that EDT would still have been in effect then, so that makes sense.  But I'm still getting search results in Eastern time - I set up my search like this:

http://qdaq.com/qsh.png

and then the results look like this:

http://qdaq.com/ZyR.png

where mintime=1316728800&maxtime=1316732400, and clicking through any of the tweets shows that they are all from between 6 and 7pm Eastern time on Sept 22.  It would seem that Topsy is checking and using my own time zone for the search instead of PST?

Thanks