The Twitter Search API sets certain arbitrary (from the outside) limits for things, from the docs:
GET statuses/:id/retweeted_by Show user objects of up to 100 members who retweeted the status.
From the gem, the code for the method is:
# Returns a random sample of all public statuses. The default access level
# provides a small proportion of the Firehose. The "Gardenhose" access
# level provides a proportion more suitable for data mining and
# research applications that desire a larger proportion to be statistically
# significant sample.
def sample(query_parameters = {}, &block)
start('statuses/sample', query_parameters, &block)
end
I checked the API docs but don't see an entry for 'statuses/sample', but looking at the one above I'm assuming you've reached 100 of whatever statuses/xxx has been accessed.
Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Twitter no longer accepts basic auth and you must use an OAuth key. If this is so, then that means you're unauthenticated, and the search API will also limit you in other ways too, see https://dev.twitter.com/docs/rate-limiting
Hope that helps.
Ok, I made a mistake there, I was looking at the search API when I should've been looking at the streaming API (my apologies), but it's possible some of the things I was talking about could be the cause of your problems so I'll leave it up. Twitter definitely has moved away from basic auth, so I'd try resolving that first, see:
https://dev.twitter.com/docs/auth/oauth/faq