One thing I forgot to mention above is that we also have a hashtag lookup service that users can engage with directly on Twitter. If you follow our @wthashtag bot, you can DM a hashtag and we will send back the definition on file in our database. Again, this is only known to those who use it, so please help us spread the word (or convince Twitter to incorporate our system). :)

No clue why Twitter Search is so limited currently. I would imagine it has to do with scaling issues and people accessing ALL of that data. Over time it will most likely open up, but we want those features now.

I do have to say, though, that being able to access hashtag definitions from Twitter seems pretty important. I think most users (beginners, dabblers, maybe even some intermediate users) might not know about any of these special sites, and they’ll turn to Twitter search first. I guess that’s one reason for tweeting about your hashtag site, for striving towards ubiquity.

Any clue as to why the Twitter search is so limited? Is it a scalability issue? A problem with the relative novelty of Twitter and the fact that they are still developing the product? And why is the live search being praised so much if it doesn’t function properly? I mean, what is the point of search if you can’t find what you are looking for, especially when you know it’s out there?

I am just as disappointed with Twitter Search as both you and Louis. Not being able to search for items more than eight days old just seems ridiculous. You know they are storing that information, so why not let us search it?

Specifically related to hashtags, our team at Microblink set out to solve the problem of defining, tracking and searching for hashtags with our first public project: What the Hashtag?!

The main goal of What the Hashtag?! is to track hashtags being used and help people understand what they are for. Not unlike Tagal.us, a large portion of our content is focused around definitions of hashtags, but we have also taken several steps to make it easier to follow the conversations taking place around those hashtags. Those steps include things like our live-streaming widget showing the latest occurrences of the hashtag, a chart of statistics showing most frequent users and usage over time, plus our more recently released transcript feature which lets you query all uses of a hashtag over a specific period of time.

Going off of your disappointment with not being able to easily track down all of your tweets from #09creowksp, that is actually something you could do with our transcript tool, as long as the hashtag is added to our database before you start using it.

We automatically track the latest trending hashtags, but if your term is not on that list (meaning it is being used by a fewer number of people or is less common), then you or someone else needs to add the hashtag to our site manually. We provide a simple process for that and then you can start taking advantage of all the features we provide.

I’ve taken the liberty to create a new page for #09creowksp, but unfortunately we will only start tracking uses of that hashtag in the future as the page was just created today. http://wthashtag.com/09creowksp

Although your #define syntax will work well to bring those definitions into the Twitter stream, we would recommend users build a page on What the Hashtag and then allow us to run all of the numbers and statistics on it for you, making it easy to get at your information later.

Myself or anyone else from our team would be happy to discuss the site in more detail if you are interested. We feel that we are adding some real value to those using hashtags and are doing our best to make people aware of that fact.

I’m happy to see people like you advocating for the use of hashtags and helping people understand the significant impact they can have.