No results for a specific user in Twitter search API

For some reason, when searching on one specific Twitter user, the search API return nothing. (ie http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=+from%3ATWITTERHANDLE_A) TWITTERHANDLE_A here is the Twitter account name. This user has been active for over a month, has had many RTs, @s and has sent such tweets out as well.

Meanwhile, I created a n开发者_运维百科ew Twitter account - we will call it TWITTERHANDLE_B. Immediately after I created the account, I sent 1 tweet and performed the same search as above (http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=+from%3ATWITTERHANDLE_B) The tweet was returned.

Is there ANYWAY to find out if and/or why a particular user would be blocked from search results? Thanks so much for any help... I'm going crazy here. Twitter's documentation just says sometimes a user's tweets won't be searched!

The documentation you refer to has a link to this page: http://support.twitter.com/forums/10713/entries/42646

The bottom entry addresses your issue, hopefully you can fix it that way.

Bear in mind the search API only grabs results from the last couple of weeks, so if the user hasn't tweeted in a while then there won't be any results.

You could try not using the Search API and grab the results directly:

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/-username-.json

Works fine for http requests at least... >_<