Question

I am reading the twitter API docs at https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1/get/search.

I’d like to retrieve historical tweets for various political candidates through time, to try to correlate polls, intrade prices, and tweets.

The until parameter looks like it does exactly what I want. However, when I make a url with the until param, I got no results.

http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=ron%20paul&until=2011-11-15

  {"completed_in":0.099,"max_id":140927967990788096,
   "max_id_str":"140927967990788096",
   "page":1,"query":"ron+paul+until%3A2011-11-15",
   "refresh_url":"?since_id=140927967990788096&q=ron%20paul%20until%3A2011-11-15",
   "results":[],
   "results_per_page":15,"since_id":0,"since_id_str":"0"}

If I drop the &until parameter, I get a happy bunch of current results.

Answer 1

It appears that Twitter API returns only results within a week in the past. Fortunately, you can use third-party software to retrieve historical data. I have found Topsy’s Otter API to be the best.

Check this out for more info: https://dev.twitter.com/discussions/757