In the search API, if you query for "RT" in the San Francisco area using the geocode parameter it returns both official retweets (ones created by hitting the retweet button) and unofficial retweets (retweets where either the user or the client has simply inserted the text RT). Official retweets keep the location field of the original tweet. Unofficial retweets take on the location of the user who retweeted the message.
The problem I'm having is that this makes geolocation searches for retweets from a certain area very confusing. It's impossible to search for what/who people in a certain city, say San Francisco are rtweeting the most. Users in San Francisco who use the official retweet feature and retweet something from NY don't show up in a query for San Francisco Retweets. Likewise, if one was interested in who from San Francisco was being retweeted the most, they would also be stymied b/c the results are polluted with unofficial RT's that look text-wise like an official RT (same message text format). So they would get a lot of results of San Franciscans retweeting people from New York. The only way to check against that would be to do a show/user lookup on the from_user, and the rate limit on that API would be eaten up very quickly for any persistant search. Is there any plan to address these issues? Has anyone in the development community found a work around? Thanks, Matt
