I'm seeing this problem too, but it only started today, around five
hours ago. Here's an example search: 
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=near%3Aedmonton

That's returning a fraction of the tweets it was before. This problem
happens occasionally, but not usually for this long.

On Oct 7, 3:10 pm, "@IDisposable" <[email protected]> wrote:
> Over the last couple months, we've seen some wierd behavior in the
> responses to search queries. First, I understand the rules about
> search being non-covering, and that we are at the mercy of the index.
> That said, I've noticed some odd behavior lately.  As background
> material, we run many searches (and we're white-listed by IP and OAuth
> account), but the two I want to reference are the Mentions and the
> Location searches.
>
> The Mentions search seems pretty stable and uses this typical search
> (and then we exclude a bunch of things like Bay St. Louis, 
> etc.):http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?rpp=100&q=stl+OR+%23stl+OR+stlo...
>
> The Location search has been VERY unstable, and uses this typical
> search:http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?rpp=100&geocode=38.627522%2C-90...
>
> As the day progresses, we move up the high-water mark in the since_id
> to track what we've already received so we should be getting minimal
> gaps. We almost never see two 100-entry polls in a row, so I think
> we're keeping up with whatever coverage the search index is offering.
>
> I've posted in a Google Spreadsheet a graph of the tweet counts we're
> seeing since 7/1/2010 so you can see the trends  http://bit.ly/9wnnFM
> (sheet two is the graph).  Some interesting things to note:
>
> 1) The Mentions search is very consistent.
> 2) The Location search likes to bounce around a bit.
> 3) In mid August, we started to have issues with more 403s and error
> about since_id being too old. We were also getting rate-limited in our
> calls to get the tweep details (since the ATOM feed is so meager). Due
> to a bug, I wasn't committing all the tweets when this happened.
> 4) On or about Sept 1st, you guys did something that broke our ability
> to stay caught up... we started getting almost no tweets and lots of
> errors about since_id being too old. I thought this was due to your
> "new tweet id" assignment being rolled out.
> 5) On Sept 5th, I got back from vacation and added logic to understand
> and use the "no new tweets, roll the tweet id forward to this" driven
> by parsing the <link rel="refresh"> node in the ATOM feed.
> 6) I also, around this time, added better logic to the tweep-lookup
> detail, only asking you for tweeps I don't have at least a minimal row
> on. This reduced the number of rate-limiting issues.
> 7) We were very stable and until 9/23 when volume falls off a lot, and
> never really recovers. I think this is the "new search" engine
> rollout.
>
> To research a little more, I tried the Twitter advanced search page
> and asking for the RSS (atom, really) feed from the advanced search
> page I get this URL 
> now:http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?geocode=38.627522,-90.19841,30....
>
> Which starts off like ours, but adds the (seemingly redundant) human-
> readable search criteria "&q=+near:38.627522,-90.19841+within:30mi".
>
> Oddly, if we remove that and do the same search at nearly the same
> instant, I DO get vastly different tweets sets... probably due to
> volume, possibly just sorting, but I would hope that with the same
> since_id value, I would get the same tweets... but I don't.
>
> So, I'm asking... what's going on?
> Why are we seeing so much volume fall-off?
> What can we do about it?
> Should I be running both searches (my current one and one with the
> human-readable query) to get better coverage?
> Is there any hope/expectation of the volume returning to normal?
> Doesn't anyone else care about tweep-location searches?
>
> Now, before you tell me that I should be using Site Streams (which I
> want to do), realize that I _NEED_ tweets from people whose profile
> location says they are in St. Louis (and similar) like the old Summize
> search honored. I can't just get by with the _tweet_ location being
> STL.
>
> Marc Brooks
> Chief guy getting yelled 
> at,http://stltweets.comhttp://taste.stltweets.comhttp://loufest.stltweets.com

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