Can't get proper number of Tweets using Python and the Twitter API

Question

I'm trying to make a simple Twitter Bot that retweets users if their tweet contains a certain hashtag

So for my search url, I have the following: http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=address&count=1

But whenever I run my program, I only get 1 tweet and its information. I'm confused as to why I only get 1 tweet and not 10. Even if I change up the value of the "count" parameter, I get 1 tweet.

And if I change the search url to replace "hashtags" with "q", I get a bunch of errors: http://search.twitter.com/search.json?hashtags=151milford&count=10

That line above gives me the following errors

File "C:\Users\Documents\pythonbot.py", line 16, in <module>
    o = urllib2.urlopen(url) #open the url
  File "C:\PYTHON27\LIB\urllib2.py", line 126, in urlopen
    return _opener.open(url, data, timeout)
  File "C:\PYTHON27\LIB\urllib2.py", line 406, in open
    response = meth(req, response)
  File "C:\PYTHON27\LIB\urllib2.py", line 519, in http_response
    'http', request, response, code, msg, hdrs)
  File "C:\PYTHON27\LIB\urllib2.py", line 444, in error
    return self._call_chain(*args)
  File "C:\PYTHON27\LIB\urllib2.py", line 378, in _call_chain
    result = func(*args)
  File "C:\PYTHON27\LIB\urllib2.py", line 527, in http_error_default
    raise HTTPError(req.get_full_url(), code, msg, hdrs, fp)
HTTPError: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden

I'm still trying to learn my way around the API so any tips would be awesome

Answer 1

Are you sure there are more tweets with that query?

Use that url in a browser, if you use for instance:

http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=trending&count=10

You'll get 10 results.

That API for twitter will only get you relatively recent tweets, so if there are no recent tweets matching your query, you'll get nothing.

Take a look here https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1 to see what parameters are supported.

The errors you're getting are due to the fact that there is no "hashtags" parameter.

Answer 2

You are using an incorrect parameter for count. Check the documentation again .

Check out this URL that returns 5 items:

https://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=stackoverflow&rpp=5

You would use the parameter rpp to control the number of results per-page , and the parameter page to control the page-offset .

Also please move to the newer v1.1 API. You would find the link in @pcalcao post.

Answer 3

I think I found why my search isn't finding everything. Apparently Twitter doesn't index all of their tweets, so that is why I'm not getting everything in my search results.

https://support.twitter.com/articles/66018#