Is Twitter's estimate of 800 million search queries per day over-inflated?

Silicon Alley Insider pulled out a pin and burst the bubble that pushed Twitter to the top of the Wednesday’s tech news with its claim of  a staggering 800 million search queries a day. According to SAI, Twitter is over-inflating its search query numbers by counting queries that are generated via its web page and third party client software that conduct searches using Twitter’s API . This latter source of queries may be causing the search number to skyrocket as many third party clients allow users to setup automated lists/columns that poll Twitter every 30 seconds when searching for a term or topic of interest. One person using Tweetdeck with one column searching for @BGR could easily generate 2880 search queries a day; multiply that by the millions of Twitter users using third party clients and you can see how that search number can balloon very rapidly. In the end, it all comes down to the definition of  what constitutes a search query. Is it an individual user manually entering in a search term? Or is it any query regardless of whether it is is manually entered or automatically generated at a rapid interval?

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