Searching Twitter

(1) Tweepsearch:I understand that one can find people on Twitter either by location or by name.

So, location :"New Zealand, Auckland" or by name "name: ****". No results.

Searches can be combined,

" location: auckland name: *****". In spite of changing the option to New Zealand in ChirpCity, the only results were from the USA.

I was wondering if the user had to join Twitter first to find people or whether the person you are trying to find also has to join?

(2) Again, using Tweepsearch, I searched for John Key in Vietnam in both basic and advanced search. I knew he had 70 photos of his recent trip from the first Twitter search.

Eventually, I entered "John Key in Vietnam" in the searchbox and lots of unrelated images came up although containing both search terms eg John Lennon, low key guy etc.

Any information regarding both these unsuccessful searches will be gratefully received!

(3) Twazzup - The best feature of twitter is "news as it happens" so I entered "All Blacks" hoping for the latest score (not that Im the slightest interested in rugby!). One very uninteresting sentance came up, followed by a rant about a majority white jury in a court case in L.A. As Twitter is limited to only 140 characters, I found it difficult to understand what it was all about.

I assume that once you join (and/or have the time) you can access all the related tweets and follow the links to their home page to find out whats it all about. As Twitter deals with a social networking environment only, I would preferably use Google to search for results.