04-use-twitter-search.md

Use Twitter search

To use search use .get('search/tweets',... there are quite a few search parameters for search.

q: '' the Q is for query so to search for mango use q: 'mango' we can also limit the results returned with count: n so let's limit it the count to in the example:

bot.get('search/tweets', {
  q: 'mango',
  count: 5
}, (err, data, response) => {
  if (err) {
    console.log(err)
  } else {
    console.log(data.statuses)
  }
})

Like we did with the timeline we will pull out specific items from the data.statuses returned, like this:

bot.get('search/tweets', {
  q: 'mango',
  count: 5
}, (err, data, response) => {
  if (err) {
    console.log(err)
  } else {
    data.statuses.forEach(s => {
      console.log(s.text)
      console.log(s.user.screen_name)
      console.log('\n')
    })
  }
})

The search API returns for relevance and not completeness, if you want to search for an exact phrase you'll need to wrap the query in quotes "purple pancakes" if you want to search for one of two words then use OR like 'tabs OR spaces' if you want to search for both use AND like 'tabs AND spaces'.

If you want to search for a tweet without another word use - like donald -trump you can use it multiple times as well, like donald -trump -duck

You can search for tweets with emoticons, like q: 'sad :(' try it!

Of course look for hashtags q: '#towie'. Look for tweets to a user q: 'to:@stephenfry' or from a user q: 'from:@stephenfry'

You can filter out indecent tweets with the filter:safe parameter you can also use it to filter for media tweets which will return tweets containing video. You can specify for images to view tweets with images and you can specify links for tweets with links.

If you want tweets from a certain website you can specify with the url parameter like url:asda

bot.get('search/tweets', {
  q: 'from:@dan_abramov url:facebook filter:images since:2017-01-01',
  count: 5
}, (err, data, response) => {
  if (err) {
    console.log(err)
  } else {
    data.statuses.forEach(s => {
      console.log(s.text)
      console.log(s.user.screen_name)
      console.log('\n')
    })
  }
})

Last few now, there's the result_type parameter that will return recent, popular or mixed results.

The geocode parameter that take the format latitude longitude then radius in miles '51.5033640,-0.1276250,1mi' example:

bot.get('search/tweets', {
  q: 'bacon',
  geocode: '51.5033640,-0.1276250,1mi',
  count: 5
}, (err, data, response) => {
  if (err) {
    console.log(err)
  } else {
    data.statuses.forEach(s => {
      console.log(s.text)
      console.log(s.user.screen_name)
      console.log('\n')
    })
  }
})

Previous: Interact with tweets.

Next: Use twitter stream API.