If you are a researcher and use Twitter's search API, it is important to know that the API will also match search terms against screen names. This may make timeline aggregations misleading depending on what you are attempting to show.
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If you are only interested in matching against the tweet text, you will need to do post-ingest processing to filter out unwanted matches.
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I always filter myself since I never managed to figure out Twitter's matching rules. Have you also noticed hits due to the previews of linked content? I vaguely remember some other issues like that one
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Yup. Generally all keywords one wants to search (or stream) will match some user handles. So it's important to have a post-collection clean up for any data collection task.
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I have seen matches against tweets where the search term didn't match the tweet text or the screen name. Do you know of any other external fields it might match against (like URL text)?
I have to do some additional testing. Wondering if you saw that as well.
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I have been caught out by this far too often 😬
Also that it'll match any words found and not just the string you really want to match, which is a pita for non-hashtag trends 🙄