I just noticed this today - may have been going on for a while,
though. I'm logged in on twitter.com. I have a few saved searches for
some friends - about four of them with different groups of friends.
What's in the search term is, for example, <screen name 1> OR <screen
name 2>. The screen names appear without @ signs.
One of these searches is returning tweets that don't match either of
the two screen names! They are returning tweets from the two screen
names *plus* some tweets that appear to be from people trying to get
me to click on links. These tweets do *not* have the characteristics
of a "Promoted Tweet". They aren't showing up at the top of the search
- they're showing up in time sequence order.
Has someone figured out how to "game" the search? Is Twitter testing
something and not telling us? When I search for "sn1 OR sn2" I do
*not* want to receive tweets like this!
http://twitter.com/rx8mall/status/14859299274