Can I search all twitter messages using their API?

Question

Is it possible to use Twitter's API to grab search results? For example, if I wanted my page to show all tweets _{(man I hate that term)} with the word "cat" in it? Is it also possible to get just the matching results that were after a certain date?

Answer 1

Yes, it is possible to get just the matching results. I am not sure about the date though.

Answer 2

Ah I found it! The documentation is here:

http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Search+API+Documentation

http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=<query>

Returns tweets that match a specified query. You can use a variety of search operators in your query. Here are a few examples:

• Find tweets containing a word: http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=twitter
• Find tweets from a user: http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=from%3Aalexiskold
• Find tweets to a user: http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=to%3Atechcrunch
• Find tweets referencing a user: http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%40mashable
• Find tweets containing a hashtag (up to 16 characters): http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23haiku
• Combine any of the operators together: http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=movie+%3A%29

You can also add this parameter:

since_id: returns tweets with status ids greater than the given id.

Answer 3

I dont think Twitter keeps histrory of tweets which are more than 1 year old. So it is not possible to search all tweets :)