How to use Twitter’s Search REST API most effectively.

The code works pretty well after I changed max_id = -1L to max_id = -1

I have one more question though... I used this code to search for tweets that contain the keyword "quit job". I found the extraction process ended after extracting only about 45,000 tweets, and 'no more tweets are found' was printed. It felt a bit strange to me as this certain keyword should be able to match much more tweets... Could you tell me why it was the case? Also, any ways to automatically start a new search after a certain period of time, when new tweets with a certain keyword enter the twitter data base?

Thank you in advance!

Formatting is somewhat broken...