Have you considered using the Streaming API for this purpose?
http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Streaming-API-Documentation#locations -- we
encourage those with heavy search needs to use it as an alternative. Search
is meant much more for servicing search results based off of user-initiated
queries, and is most tuned for that purpose.
Taylor
On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 2:37 PM, ELB wrote:
> Hello,
>
> We are looking at getting city based search results for 14 major
> cities.
>
> The current method we use is to plug in a cities Geo Coordinates into
> the search API and then include a 25KM radius around the city. This
> works well and allows us to get true results of people inside or
> around a given city.
> However, for maybe a 20 minute period once or twice per day, the
> results are empty. We go from 50-100+ results for a given keyword to
> 0 - 5 results. Then, 20 minutes later there will again be 50 - 100+
> results including several results for the time period whereby the
> results were blank. So, its not a case of Twitter not having results,
> it is a case of a 10 - 20 minute window whereby Twitter's results with
> the GEO filter don't show up - or barely show up for a given time
> period.
>
> This has led us to consider using the Near API. From what I
> understand, the Near API will give us results near a given city based
> off of GEO data as well as profile data. I would assume this may be a
> more stable option - but the option we use now is great except for
> those rare instances whereby Twitter shows us little to no results for
> a keyword they clearly have a lot of results for within our GEO
> coordinates.
>
> ELB
>
