Despite the problem being quite old it is still ongoing and with no sign of a resolution. Twitter has been conspicuous by its silence.
Few accounts set up in the past couple of months have any indexes at all.
No real time post searche, no hashtag searches, no people searches

But, some accounts set up recently have at least hashtag and real time post indexes … strange and frustrating for a large group of “ordunary” users.

It’s especially frustrating because it means I quite literally can’t join in conversations when I’m at events – and I make my living at least partly doing the sort of events that twitter would feature heavily at. http://twitter.com/solobasssteve has the same problem.

This problem is significant in re: Moonfruit’s current #moonfruit hashtag contest. How many people think they are submitting entries to that contest, when really their #moonfruits are disappearing into a black hole? None of mine have shown up in Twitter search so far.

I wrote to the Moonfruit people trying to get an answer about this. Here’s a page with some background (including this story) and my letter to Moonfruit asking if they are basing their contest entry selection on Twitter’s faulty search index: http://lancebrown.org/twitter-stuff/letter-to-moonfruit-about-their-moonfruit-contest-and-twitters-search-problem/

Thanks for this article Kathryn!