Performing multiple searches of a term in Twitter

I have little working knowledge of python. I k开发者_开发知识库now that there is something called a Twitter search API, but I'm not really sure what I'm doing. I know what I need to do:

I need point data for a class. I thought I would just pull up a map of the world in a GIS application, select cities that have x population or larger, then export those selections to a new table. That table would have a key and city name.

next i randomly select 100 of those cities. Then I perform a search of a certain term (in this case, Gaddafi) for each of those 100 cities. All I need to know is how many posts there were on a certain day (or over a few days depending on amount of tweets there were).

I just have a feeling there is something that already exsists that does this, and I'm having a hard time finding it. I've dowloaded and installed python-twitter but have no idea how to get this search done. Anyone know where I can find or how I can make this tool? Any suggestions would really help. Thanks!

A tweet itself comes with a geo tag. But it is a new feature and majority tweets do not have it. So it is not possible to search for all tweets containing "Gaddafi" from a city given the city name.

What you could do is the reverse, you search for "Gaddafi" first (regardless of geo location), using search api. Then, for each tweet, find the location of the poster (either thru the RESTful api or use some sort of web scraping).

so basically you can classify the tweets collected according to the location of the poster.

I think only tweepy have access to both twitter search API as well as RESTful API.