It seems that after yesterday’s extended downtime for Twitter (which no one really raised much of a fuss about, since it’s just another routine day for tweeps worldwide — unlike, say, Skype) has some (severe?) repercussions: search results are being limited to the past ~6 days for low-volume queries.
A quick search for “git tower” on Twitter returns results limited to the past six days, only. (A quick shout-out: Tower.app for OS X gets our award for best Mac development tool of 2010!) And the same goes for searches for “NeoSmart” or “EasyBCD.” (Unfortunately, none of these topics are anywhere near “trending” on twitter, and the low volume of search results serves to prove the point).
Whether this is a case of Twitter purposely capping duration of search results to cope with high load times (each new search is taking ~.6 seconds, which is rather a lot!) or if somehow this data has been lost due to the server outage, it’s cases like these that really illustrate the need for “Twitter archives” that maintain a persistent, searchable store of Twitter feeds. While 3rd party Twitter search utilities *do* exist, nothing official and guaranteed exists as of yet.
Let’s hope this capping of search results is only temporary and that earlier results will become available as the days go by. It would really suck to lose something as basic as fulltext search for tweets older than a certain amount of time (especially if it’s a low number)!
Follow NeoSmart Technologies @NeoSmart on twitter!