Tweepy API search doesn't have keyword

Question

I am working with Tweepy (python's REST API client) and I'm trying to find tweets by several keywords and without url included in tweet.

But search results are not up to our satisfaction. Looks like query has erros and was stopped. Additionally we had observed that results were returned one-by-one not (as previously) in bulk packs of 100.

Could you please tell me why this search does not work properly?

We wanted to get all tweets mentioning 'Amazon' without any URL links in the text. We used search shown below. Search results were still containing tweets with URLs or without 'Amazon' keyword.

Could you please let us know what we are doing wrong?

auth = tweepy.AppAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret)
api = tweepy.API(auth, wait_on_rate_limit=True, wait_on_rate_limit_notify=True)
searchQuery = 'Amazon OR AMAZON OR amazon filter:-links' # Keyword

new_tweets = api.search(q=searchQuery, count=100,
                        result_type = "recent",
                        max_id = sinceId,
                        lang = "en") 

Answer 1

The minus sign should be put before "filter", not before "links", like this: searchQuery = 'Amazon OR AMAZON OR amazon -filter:links'

Also, I doubt that the count = 100 option is a valid one, since it is not listed on the API documentation (which may not be very up-to-date, though). Try to replace that with rpp = 100 to get tweets in bulk packs.

I am not sure why some of the tweets you find do not contain the "Amazon" keyword, but a possibility is that "Amazon" is contained within the username of the poster. I do not know if you can filter that directly in the query, or even if you would want to filter it, since it would mean you would reject tweets from the official Amazon accounts. I would suggest that, for each tweet the query returns, you check it to make sure it does contain "Amazon".