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Asked: 2026-06-06T16:11:10+00:00

I am using the Twitter Search API and I can’t understand the id field

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I am using the Twitter Search API and I can’t understand the id field of a tweet.

For example here is one: <id>tag:search.twitter.com,2005:1990561514</id>. The real ID is the final number part, right? Why doesn’t Twitter already provide this in a single element? And, why is there a year of 2005on the ID field? Is that the ID of that year and the following year tweets get an ID recounted to zero? Is the ID indexed to the year?

I am asking all this stuff, because I am going to use the option of since_id to retrive new tweets. If the ID isn’t really unique and depends on the year, it won’t work as expected.

Thanks.

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  1. Editorial Team

    The tag is unique – but parts of it are redundant.

    tag:search.twitter.com,2005:1990561514

    Obviously, search.twitter.com is the URL from where you requested the document.

    The ,2005 is constant. As far as I can tell, it has never changed since the service was launched. While there’s no official documentation, I would guess that it refers to the ATOM specification namespace – http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom“

    Finally, the long number is the Tweet’s status ID. It will always be unique and can be used for the since_id.

    What you will need to do is split the string, and just use the number after the colon as your ID.

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