Changes to search results for trending topics

[Ryan Sarver]

Today on the Twitter Blog we announced that we will be changing search
results for trending topics to improve the quality. It used to be that
trends were a great way to quickly see what was going on on Twitter,
but they have begun to get fairly noisy due to the sheer volume of
tweets. We wanted to improve that experience and will start returning
what we think are the best results. This doesn't mean that tweets are
getting dropped from the index, instead we are just making intelligent
decisions on which ones to return for searches on popular topics,
beginning with trending topics. If you make a more specific search,
you can still get to all the tweets.

So for you, the developer, this means that if you will see better
quality results over the search API for trends, but you won't be
getting every tweet that matched the search term. If you still do want
to get every tweet matching a trend, we recommend you check out the
Streaming API (http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Streaming-API-Documentation).
In the end, this is a change that is good for developers and
end-users, but we wanted to notify you as you might be seeing some
slightly different behavior via the API.

Please let us know if you have any questions -- we are happy to answer.

Ryan