To further a personal project of mine, I have been pondering how to count the number of results for a user specified word on Twitter. I have used their API extensively, but have not been able to come up with an efficient or even halfway practical way to count the occurrences of a particular word. The actual results are not critical, just the overall count. I'll keep scratching my head. Any ideas or direction pointing would be most appreciated.
+3
A:
They don't provide that information at this time for past messages, in fact their searches only go back as far as 100 pages (1,500 tweets):
http://search.twitter.com/search?page=100&q=tomatoes
Your best bet, aside from contacting and working with Twitter itself, is to get a realtime feed of all the tweets and start building your own corpus.
Adam Davis
2009-02-24 03:37:50
A:
I'm able to go back about a week. I start my search with the parameters that Adam posted and then key off of the smallest id in the set of search results, like so, http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?lang=en&q=iphone&rpp=100&max_id= where max_id = the min(id) of the 100 results I just pulled.
John Munoz
2010-07-17 15:40:38