Twitter rate limiting confusion?

Question

So I'm currently using NodeXL to get search for a particular Twitter hashtag, and I'm having trouble on understand how exactly the rate-limiting works. I looked it up in Twitter's API Rate Limits page, and also this SO post, but even after reading both, I don't really understand. The API page says:

Search will be limited at 180 queries per 15 minute window for the time being.

and also

Rate limiting in version 1.1 of the API is primarily considered on a per-user basis — or more accurately described, per access token in your control. If a method allows for 15 requests per rate limit window, then it allows you to make 15 requests per window per leveraged access token.

But I'm totally confused... probably because I've never really worked with anything database, or social network analysis before.

When it says that it always 180 queries per 15 minutes, what exactly constitutes a query? The way the search works on NodeXL is that you limit the amount of tweets you are searching for. So if I search once and set my tweet limit to 1000 tweets, is that only 1 query?

Sorry if this seems like a stupid or really elementary question, but I just don't have any experience with this stuff at all, and any help would be much appreciated, thanks!

Answer 1

When it says that it always 180 queries per 15 minutes, what exactly constitutes a query?

Whenever you make one request to Twitter, its considered as one query. For Search API you can make 180 calls per 15 minute.

So if I search once and set my tweet limit to 1000 tweets, is that only 1 query?

Yes, but you can't set count to 1000 since the maximum tweets you can return per request is 100 as it mentioned here.

You can retrieve the latest 100 tweets with the normal search query and for pagination you should use since_id and max_id to retrieve the next 100 tweets for fresh tweets.

The number of queries you can make per 15 min windows varies by API. For example, you can query 180 requests per 15 min window if you use Search API. But, if you use API like GET friends/ids, it's limited to 15 query per 15 min windows. i.e you can make call only 15 times per 15 minutes.

Here's the Rate limits chart where you can find how many requests you can make per 15 window for each API.