The at symbol (@) does not seem to work when searching tweets. When the @ symbol is alone (surrounded by nothing or whitespace) in a search, the search returns 0 English results. Sometimes languages that use non-ascii characters seem to be found. However, when the @ is followed by at least 1 alphanumeric character, the query seems to work fine.
I found this by searching for "@ the diner downtown", and I was getting back 0 results, but at least 1 results should have been returned, because that's what I tweeted. This probably affects searches for mentions too, because you can't just search for "@". I've used the web site and the search API: http://twitter.com/#search?q=%40 http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%40 Has anyone gotten a query to work with @ standing alone? This there a different way to perform the same search?
