blog.eliduke.com

Why does Twitter Search suck so much? Really. Why is it one of the worst search engines out there these days? I still have aspirations of releasing my own Twitter Archiving Solution (although I haven’t worked on it much the past couple months), but every time I use Twitter Search it motivates me even more toward that pursuit.

Today I saw a tweet from my good-old-buddy-old-pale @mcrashelle, asking if anyone had any suggestions on a cheap but effective digital camera to buy. I’ve been pretty happy with my PINK PowerShot SD1100 IS, and I knew that I tweeted about it at some point, so I thought that I could probably just reuse the bit.ly link therein.

I fired up Twitter’s Advanced Search and put in a few parameters: the KEYWORD I was looking for (pink – the color of my camera), and my USERNAME (elisfanclub). I hit enter, and guess what it found… Jack & Shit. Honestly, I knew for a fact that I’d tweeted that word at least a couple times in the past few months, but it wasn’t finding anything.

[side note: now that search finds the tweet that I posted after doing all this research.]

But then I thought that maybe I needed to put in some DATE parameters so that it will know to look back more than like 5 minutes. I went back to the search, and said that I wanted it to look as far back as March 1st (because I knew that I bought my camera during the first week of March when I was in Hawaii). I hit enter, and guess what it found… ERROR! [You did not collect all of my Breh-awns!]

This isn’t the first time that Twitter Search has sucked, this isn’t the first time that inputing a date into the Advanced Search breaks everything, this isn’t the first time that I’ve had to go back through my timeline, page by page, to find the tweet that I’m looking for.

Oh, and would you look at that, there it is…

My Coolpix 7600 [http://bit.ly/jO5n9] died last night (after like 4 years!) so I bought a PINK PowerShot SD1100 IS [http://bit.ly/UiCgV].

- 4:53 PM Mar 2nd from web

Seriously, Twitter. You need to get your shit together.