Twitter Search API v1.1 not working

Question

I'm using the Twitter Search API v1.1 to simply search by hashtag #monstercareers. This bit of code works for other hashtags, but will not work for this particular one. I know this API is slightly different from the one Twitter actually uses (which makes it difficult to test), but if you search #monstercareers on Twitter.com it works fine.

<?php

  require_once('lib/TwitterAPIExchange.php');

  $url = "https://api.twitter.com/1.1/search/tweets.json";
  $getfield = "?q=#monstercareers";
  $requestMethod = "GET";

  $settings = array(
    'oauth_access_token' => "xxx",
    'oauth_access_token_secret' => "xxx",
    'consumer_key' => "xxx",
    'consumer_secret' => "xxx"
  );

  $twitter = new TwitterAPIExchange($settings);
  echo $twitter->setGetfield($getfield)->buildOauth($url, $requestMethod)->performRequest();

?>

Here is the empty response I get with the above code:

{
  statuses: [ ],
  search_metadata: {
   completed_in: 0.006,
   max_id: 396701092337053700,
    max_id_str: "396701092337053696",
    query: "%23monstercareers",
    refresh_url: "?since_id=396701092337053696&q=%23monstercareers&include_entities=1",
    count: 15,
    since_id: 0,
    since_id_str: "0"
   }
}

Does anyone have any idea on why this might be an inconsistency, and if there's a better way around this?

Answer 1

Doing some research I have found that the twitter API only looks back up to 6-9 days of tweets, so in the case you might want to look back on time, you need to use the until param.

Checkout the documentation on https://dev.twitter.com/docs/using-search on the Best Practices Section.