A few weeks ago I noticed during the BrightNight event that my tweets did not appear in the backchannel. After extensively searching the Twitter Support pages on ‘Tweets Not In Search/Hashtags not working‘ I found out that for some reason Twitter had blocked/removed my tweets from search.
After some shout outs on Twitter, it appeared I wasn’t the only one. The initial Support pages said that the issue would resolve itself over time but after a few weeks I was getting impatient. Hashtags have become an important feature of Twitter and I felt left out during conferences, not being able to participate in the backchannel.
Yesterday @bertboerland sent me a link to file a request to be remove the constraints that have been put, for unknown reasons (I might have been marked as a spam account), on my account. Within a day I received word from Twitter that my tweets appear in search again.
Search is a core feature of Twitter as it is being used to retrieve hashtags related to a particular event for backchannels. Search could become even more powerful if Twitter would extend search retrieval beyond two weeks. It would make extensive analysis possible without scheduling a scraper.
Thanks for posting the solution to this problem and the link to file the problem report. Twitter took care of the issue within 24 hours.