Friday, March 11, 2022

Twitter needs to restore my tweets to normal complete visibility in search results

Nearly all of my tweets have been deindexed by Twitter, either as the result of a glitch, or as punisment for an alleged infraction of Twitter rules that I have not been told about and can thus not defend or explain or beg forgiveness for. 

Thursday, March 10, 2022

Email to Chanel @Twitter support, Support@Twitter.com, @TwitterSupport, re reindexing @ChuckBaggett's tweets


Thanks for your reply. 

I'm having great difficulty in getting Twitter to make my tweets show in search results. As part of this misery, Twitter sent me this email:

Hello @chuckbaggett, 

Thanks for your response. We do apologize but we only display a certain amount of Tweets in the Tweets tab and in the Tweets and reply tab.

In your Tweets tab, we display 800 of your most recent Tweets. In your Tweets & replies tab, we display 3,200 of your most recent Tweets and replies.  Anything over that will go into your Twitter archives. You have 308,573 Tweets.

The reason for this is because of indexing capacity restrictions by Twitter.

Thanks, 

Chanel

Twitter Support

I responded as follows:

The problem I asked for help with is not about how many tweets show at https://twitter.com/ChuckBaggett or at https://twitter.com/ChuckBaggett/with_replies, so the information you gave about limits of 800 or 3,200 is not relevant. 

I am talking about tweets showing up or not showing up in Twitter search or Twitter advanced search. 

Here are pictures of how one accesses regular twitter search and Twitter Advanced Search.

Regular search:
image.png

You get to Advanced Search after making a regular search by opening a menu like this:
image.png

And when you click the Advanced Search option shown above you get the Advanced Search Dialog, which looks like this:

image.png

The problem is that my tweets don't show in search results like they ought to, because they have been deindexed. 

They did show properly, normally, for over ten years; then something went wrong. 

 They can and should show normally in search results again, if only I can get someone to understand what I am saying who cares enough to help me out.

Twitter's search system can return results from when a person first started Twitter up till now. I know this because I've used Twitter search many times a day nearly every day since I started Twitter in October of 2008. 

You can demonstrate this easily just by searching yourself. 

As an example, I did a search using Twitter's advanced search page at https://twitter.com/search-advanced. 

I found Jack Dorsey's earliest tweets, the oldest one still visible to the public, nearly or actually the first tweets ever posted on Twitter, shown here. 
image.png
Below is the search syntax Advanced search produces to see these results from 2006: 
(from:jack) until:2006-03-22 since:2006-02-19 

Here is the url that is produced when one does this search:


I created my @ChuckBaggett account a bit later than @Jack, in October of 2008. 

I will now do a search in Twitter Advanced search dialog, which does the search by generating the following search syntax: (from:chuckbaggett) until:2008-10-31 since:2008-10-01


Here's what that search produces:

image.png

If Twitter search was behaving properly toward my tweets, it would display some tweets from then, because I made some. I know I made some because they are in my Twitter archive.

Here is a screenshot of Twitter not returning any tweets for my first month. 

No Twitter search produces any results for me from when I first started until sometime in 2021. 

This is abnormal. 

It is a malfunction on Twitter's part, and it can and should be corrected. 

Here's a search for my tweets for the year 2010, for example: 
Advanced Search syntax :(from:chuckbaggett) until:2010-12-31 since:2010-01-01 


Here is a picture showing how it returns nothing when it should show many tweets. 

image.png

Not returning results when there are tweets that match the search string is not normal. It is not how Twitter is supposed to work. There is a problem that is fixable and should be fixed. 

I have the archive for my tweets, so I can use that to find the exact words of a tweet I made, and do a test search using those words. I tried a Chinese virtual world called Hipihi back then. "Hipihi" is a distinctive word. It's in the first tweet I posted that still exists. Here's that url: https://twitter.com/ChuckBaggett/status/952214882 and here's the text: "I am writing a blog post at my blogger blog, and I'm going to try to fire up the Hipihi virtual world and get some screenshots." Here's a screenshot of the tweet. 
image.png

If I search for the word "Hipihi" from October 3rd through October 12, my tweet should be in the search results, but it's not, because nearly all of my tweets are missing from search results, because they have been deindexed. https://twitter.com/search?q=hipihi%20until%3A2008-10-12%20since%3A2008-10-03&src=typed_query&f=top 

image.png

I feel like I'm pulling teeth trying to get across something that is easily understandable and extremely trivially easy to test. 

If you can't get my tweets restored to normal visibility in search results, please help me get in touch with someone who can. 

Thanks in advance for your potential help in getting my tweets to appear in search results like they should, and did over 10 years, and should now, like every other Twitter users' tweets. 

Chuck Baggett

Ukraine Quiz On Sporcle

 I like taking quizzes. This seems like a good time to take a quiz on Ukraine.


I got about half right, and that only because I'd just taken another quiz on Ukraine's neighbor. 

Sporcle is a great quiz site. Its at sporcle.com.