Hey Jimbo,
I can understand your confusion. Each of the APIs handles things
differently and their different approaches can make things like this
hard to work out. I've answered your questions inline.
A) Search API: Keyword Search
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All retweets appear, against matching search term ( some text from the
tweet ) including opening phrase: "retweeter RT @retweeted
{tweet.....}"
This is expected behavior although the Retweet you refer to is the
"old style" and is not counted as a retweet in our system. Native
retweets show as a single Tweet with a block underneath saying
something like "100+ recent retweets". Native retweets do not show as
separate entries in the search API.
So searching for a keyword will show the original Tweet with a block
underneath indicating how many native retweets that Tweet had. It will
also find old style RTs as to Twitter those are the same as a Tweet.
Example "JSON NULL"
B) Search API: Username
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Only the original tweet plus those RT's that have been done the "old
fashioned" way appear.
If you are searching for just the username and not "from:username",
the results behave the same as A.
So searching for a username will show the original Tweet with a block
underneath indicating how many native retweets that Tweet had. It will
also find old style RTs as to Twitter those are the same as a Tweet.
Example "twitterapi"
X) Twitter Website - twitter.com/#retweeted_of_mine
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Tweets appear plus lots of information about the retweets; count, user IDs etc.
In some ways it is useful to think of Search as Index which points you
to the actual Tweet. If you think of it that way it makes sense the
website knows more about a Tweet than Search does. twitter.com is also
built to show you complete information about Tweets. Search is
designed to find real-time relevant Tweets about a keyword.
Y) Twitter API - http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/retweets_of_me.json
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Original retweeted tweets appear but there's no retweet data. There's
an empty "retweet_count" node and a FALSE "retweeted" node ( which is
demonstrably wrong ).
Many developers have been asking for access to the retweet information
displayed on the website so we added the retweet_count and retweeted
nodes last week. Unfortunately we found an issue with those fields
soon after launch which we need to work out. Until then those fields
will not include useful information. We'll be updating this mailing
list with developments.
I hope that answers you questions and clarifies reason for the differences.
Matt Harris
Developer Advocate, Twitter
http://twitter.com/themattharris
--
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