Search problems for from:username searches

[bjhess]

We have had some users complain about not being able to find
themselves on http://followcost.com. I've dug into the code and it
appears the failure is happening on queries to the search API of the
form "from:username".

A couple example queries that return zero results:

http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=from%3A1918
http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=from%3Athecurrent

Yet clearly these users are active, and legitimate, Twitter users:

http://twitter.com/1918
http://twitter.com/thecurrent

But sadly, is it that these users are not being indexed at all in the
search DB? I get zero results doing a simple from:username search for
the same users:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=from%3A1918
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=from%3Athecurrent

These are just a couple examples. Is it common for legitimate,
upstanding Twitter users to be unindexed in the search DB?

--
Barry Hess
http://followcost.com
http://bjhess.com

[Barry Hess]

http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/browse_thread/thread/f3859409fb05127c

--
Barry Hess
http://bjhess.com
http://iridesco.com

[Abraham Williams]

Ooooo! I love recursion!

--
Abraham Williams | http://the.hackerconundrum.com
Hacker | http://abrah.am | http://twitter.com/abraham
Project | http://fireeagle.labs.poseurtech.com
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Sent from Madison, Wisconsin, United States

[Doug Williams]

Please file a help ticket at http://help.twitter.com. @thecurrents tweets almost always have links that point back to the same source. This is normally indicative of spam which may explain why the account is no longer in search. The folks in support can help you take care issues like these.

Thanks,

Doug

[Howard Siegel]

Doug,

I've been having a problem seeing my own tweets in search for quite a few months, and I know my tweets were not showing up in a hashtag search at a conference I was at a few weeks ago (which made it really hard to participate in the conference's twitter conversation!).  I did file a help ticket a while back and was basically put off by the response from support (essentially it said "too bad, so sad") and they closed the ticket on me.  I have not had the time nor patience to follow up on it, though, as I know that my tweets are getting out since people do respond to them.  Would be nice if my tweets showed in searches, though.

- h

[Abraham Williams]

My experience interacting with http://help.twitter.com this year has been nothing for 2 months until the ticket auto closes. Support is hard to scale for 40 million accounts.