Hi, I'm developing desktop Twitter application for Mac, targeting Japanese Twitterers. I've recently implemented a feature to interface the official Twitter Search API. It came to my attention that there are several severe issues with the current implementation of Twitter Search.
Firstly, many tweets posted by Japanese Twitterers are not being indexed at all. Yes, I have read the notice regarding missing tweets from the search results. (http://help.twitter.com/forums/10713/entries/42646) >From looking at several people I follow, about 50% of people are not being indexed at all. Actually, tweets were never indexed at all. Many of the other Japanese developers have also noticed these issues. I have tried using the "locale" option for the search API, but it didn't help much. Secondly, the operator to execute an exact phrase search (documented at http://search.twitter.com/operators) does not work for Japanese query. I'm not sure if it's supposed to work with the API though. This issue is annoying, because search results returned from a query containing Japanese characters seems to return very fuzzy results. I get very irrelevant results, and even find it difficult to figure out why it even matched at all. I consider Twitter Search to be the major feature of Twitter, and I think correcting these issues will make Twitter much better web service for Japanese people. Thank you. -- Aki
