Bad Celebrity Search Results

[rob]

Hi,

I'm doing a project that deals specifically with P Diddy (twitter.com/
iamdiddy). When I do a search, no tweets newer than May 6th show up.
However, looking at his timeline, more recent tweets exist. This isn't
a problem with my tweets (twitter.com/robseward). Also, it appears
search is not returning accurate results for other celebrities online.
Does anyone know what's going on here? Is the problem isolated to
users with a high number of followers or is it something non celebrity-
related. Some examples below:


P Diddy:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=from%3Aiamdiddy
http://twitter.com/iamdiddy

Ashton Kutcher:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=from%3Aaplusk
http://twitter.com/aplusk

Shaq:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=from=THE_REAL_SHAQ
twitter.com/THE_REAL_SHAQ


Me (not a celebrity. Accurate search results).
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=+from%3Arobseward
twitter.com/robseward



Rob

[Hayes Davis]

I'm also curious about this phenomenon. It does seem that certain high-profile users are indexed poorly in search. It doesn't seem to correlate exactly with follower numbers but I've not done much in the way of empirical analysis on that.

It's causing me some trouble on tweetreach.com as I often get requests to run reach reports about things tweeted by high profile users only to find that tweets from those users aren't returned by search.

Should I file an issue for this?

Hayes

[Brendan O'Connor]

i just found out some high-volume users aren't indexed at all.  for example:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=+from%3Athe_real_shaq

and it's not just the from: operators that's broken.  if I search for some text from one of his most recent tweets, nothing from him shows up.

for this tweet: http://twitter.com/THE_REAL_SHAQ/status/1785949479
this search doesn't get it: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=Listen+in+tonite+7p+to+9p+Shaq

-Brendan

[explicious]

Hi Brendan,

found out how? references? or merely observed per the link? It's
curious because it might be throwing off my calculated 'coolness
vector' - I noticed the coolness vector of a tweet containing a celebs
name seemed lower than anticipiated - however it wasn't the point of
the experiment, mind you - I just found the downplay sorta odd and mad-
ening. :-)

Thanks
Waitman

[Brendan O'Connor]

i wanted to get all of shaq's tweets with the search api and i couldn't :)

going through random ones on twitterholic ..
from:aplusk barely works
from:scobleizer works
from:adventuregirl works
from:timoreilly works

haven't tried the standard API for these.

bleah
Brendan

[rob]

I just tried this with the API, and it seems to work for Diddy:

feed://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.atom?screen_name=iamdiddy

And Shaq:

feed://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.atom?screen_name=THE_REAL_SHAQ