In my earlier post today, Reader Question: Keeping Track of Twitter Hash Tags, I mentioned how you can search for tweets with a certain tag and then either bookmark the results page or subscribe to its feed.

However, recently a reader wrote to me and told me that a hash tag that she and some friends were using wasn't showing up in searches. (I'm not going to identify the tag, since they had created it for a particular group of people.)

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Update 01/26/10: A reader pointed out to me that no tweets will show up in searches if you've got them set to "protected," meaning people must be approved to follow you. So if that's the case, you'll have to change your settings to have your hash tags (or any tweets) show up in a search.

Update 09/09/2009: Since I wrote this, I discovered a possible solution, which I've written about in a follow-up post, QuickTip: When You or Your Hash Tags Don't Show Up in a Twitter Search. I've had a number of readers tell me this has worked for them, so you might want to check it out yourself. If it still doesn't work, you can return to this post and try some of my alternate suggestions below.

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I also tried searching on the tag and, sure enough, it didn't appear, even though it was definitely showing up in the tweets they were posting. Even when I clicked on the actual tag link in one of the tweets, I was taken to a search results page with no results!

I haven't been able to replicate the problem with any other hash tag so far, so I don't know what it is about this one that is causing the problem. I logged a request with Twitter Support five days ago but, according to the status page, it is "awaiting assignment to a help desk operator."

Although the actual hash tag didn't work in the search, I did discover there were two other ways to address her requirements of tracking the related tweets. So if you have the same problem, you can try one of them.

• Search on the term without the hash tag. E.g. "tech4ludds". This worked for her situation because the term they were using was unique enough there was little to no chance that it would appear in any other non-related tweet. Obviously, this wouldn't be very helpful if the hash tag term was something fairly common.
• Search on the hash tag with a space between it and the term. E.g. "# tech4ludds". I have no idea why this worked, but it did.

If you do have the same problem at some point, I'd love to hear about it so I might be able to discover what's causing it.

Posted in Bug Alert,How To,Social Media,Twitter