Thanks. Depends on DuckDuckGo's indexing speed — I've seen it pull tweets from within the last 30 minutes, but it varies. For my use case I'm pulling the top tweets from the past 24 hours as a daily digest, so the delta doesn't really matter.
Every free method of getting Twitter data is dead or paid. Nitter shut down when Twitter killed guest accounts. Twint is broken. The official API starts at $100/month.
I found a combination that still works: DuckDuckGo indexes public tweets and returns URLs. fxtwitter (3,500+ stars, built for Discord embeds) has a public JSON API that returns full tweet data for any tweet ID — text, likes, retweets, replies, views, author, timestamps. No auth, no key, no account.
Nobody had combined the two. DuckDuckGo can search but can't read tweets. fxtwitter can read tweets but can't search. Together they give you a free, zero-credential Twitter search API.
That gives you ranked tweet objects as JSON to stdout. Pipe it wherever you want.
It also has a markdown digest mode and an optional claude -p integration for AI-summarized daily digests via launchd, but the core value is the data pipeline itself.