Currently there is no way to do wildcard/substring/fuzzy searching. Only exact tokens are searchable. I agree this is somewhat limiting, but otherwise the searching/indexing performance would suffer horribly.
-Chad On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 10:18 AM, Nick <t2then...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Karthik - I'm not sure what you mean by "decorated" - the names do > hyperlink to the profile pages. But typically, I think the @ being > found is within the tweet content. All of these non-english tweets > either have the @ symbol alone, or they contain a mention. > > I've looked through a lot of the API docs and online forums, and I saw > that Twitter doesn't really have a wildcard search. Is that true? > If I want to search posts for mentions or *partial* words, is there > any way to do that? For instance, if I want to find mentions that > start with @T2*, where * can be anything or nothing...(and I would > find, for example, @T2thenike) is there a way to do that? This > partial search would be handy for searching hashtags too, so you don't > have to nail the hashtag term exactly > > I guess I'm looking for a "fuzzier" way to search. Any suggestions? > > On Oct 8, 8:20 am, Karthik Murugan <fermis...@gmail.com> wrote: >> This is strange. Did you also notice that for Non-English tweets >> returned fromhttp://twitter.com/#search?q=%40, the user names are >> decorated with links to their profile pages? >> >> Well, Twitter doesn't index symbols like @ # $ ^. If you'd like to >> gather the tweets containing references to twitter names, you should >> use the Streaming API to do so, because Search API doesn't treat @ as >> a keyword. >> >> On Oct 8, 3:18 am, Nick <t2then...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> > The atsymbol(@) does not seem to work when searching tweets. When >> > the @symbolis alone (surrounded by nothing or whitespace) in a >> > search, the search returns 0 English results. Sometimes languages >> > that use non-ascii characters seem to be found. However, when the @ >> > is followed by at least 1 alphanumeric character, the query seems to >> > work fine. >> >> > I found this by searching for "@ the diner downtown", and I was >> > getting back 0 results, but at least 1 results should have been >> > returned, because that's what I tweeted. This probably affects >> > searches for mentions too, because you can't just search for "@". >> >> > I've used the web site and the search >> > API:http://twitter.com/#search?q=%40http://search.twitter.com/search.atom... >> >> > Has anyone gotten a query to work with @ standing alone? This there a >> > different way to perform the same search? >
