My goal is to retrieve all Tweets, or as significant a proportion as I can, that originate from certain small countries such as Ireland,New Zealand,Lithuania etc.
Twitter's Search API allows the searching of statuses in a radius around a given lat/long. Twitter decides which results to return by the geotag data included in a user's profile, or by reverse-geocoding the user's Hometown location in their profile.
The public status stream in the Streaming API can be filtered by geobox, but Twitter does not perform reverse-geocoding when returning these results. Research so far has indicated that not very many people at all in these countries use geo-tagging.
Obviously, if I had access to the firehose stream, then using the Streaming API would be the way to go, as I could perform the reverse-geocoding myself. At the default access level, however, the random sample stream does not provide enough relevant users to me.
What, then, if any benefit could I get from using the Streaming API? Should I simply stick to the Search API, as I am unlikely to get any unique data from the Streaming API?
