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Asked: 2026-06-12T19:17:28+00:00

I’ve been building an app which allows the user to search through recent (i.e.

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I’ve been building an app which allows the user to search through recent (i.e. 6-9 days worth) public tweets on Twitter using the Twitter Search API.

Currently, the site is entirely public – that is, users do not need to sign in to Twitter (or even be Twitter users at all) to use my app.

However, the upcoming changes to the Twitter API have left me confused, particularly the fact it would appear that every request to Twitter’s API will need to be authenticated.

My limited understanding of how Twitter’s API works is that I need to authenticate my app using OAUTH, which in turn means that, if I want to continue accessing the Twitter Search API, users will need to sign in to my site before they can use the functionality related to the Search API – hence, only Twitter users will be able to use that section of my app.

Am I understanding this correctly, or is the Twitter Search API exempt from the changes? If I authenticate my app, does this mean the rate at which users can search Twitter status updates through my app is increased (or any other advantages over having non-authenticated apps)? Note that I am currently implementing a caching feature to cache related searches.

Thanks!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The changes to the Twitter API would affect your application depending on how your application works. These are the changes that you should be aware of:

    1. All requests used to be anonymous. Now, all requests must be authenticated via OAuth.
    2. With the old rate limits, according to my tests, you where able to make about one request per second per IP address. Now you can make 180 requests per 15 minute block per authenticated user (1 request every 5 seconds on average).
    3. Not related, but still worth mentioning, the data that the new API returns is more similar to the data that the Streaming API returns. It’s much more complete.

    So, according to these changes, if your application uses some kind of a bot which polls the Search API, stores the results into a database, and then your users search within these stored results; you will have to implement OAuth with your own access token, which you can get by creating an application at dev.twitter.com.

    But, if your application connects to the Search API every time that your users interact with it, and you think that you will have to make more than one request every 5 seconds on average, then you will have to ask your users to authenticate in order to get their access tokens for your requests.

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