8 American troops killed in Afghanistan

The Washington Post declared this breaking news.

News Alert
10:26 AM EDT Tuesday, October 27, 2009

U.S. military: 8 American troops killed in Afghanistan

U.S. military says 8 American troops were killed in bomb attacks in southern Afghanistan.

For more information, visit washingtonpost.com - http://link.email.washingtonpost.com/r/1BAF0O/F2MQB/P3W2ZB/AYEP7E/EIFNU/QR/t

There are a lot of words in the headline for creating a search phrase. This is the Tweetvolume search.

"American" seemed to be the limiting point in the searches so I went with "8 troops killed Afghanistan." That did not produce 765 tweets; I do not know how they got that. It did produce more than 100 compared to approximately 25 for the others. I checked the tweets and all except 1 was about the incident The Post announced as breaking news; the one was a few days earlier and was 8 UN troops who were killed.

I began collecting "8 troops killed Afghanistan" approximately 9:45 a.m. October 27, 2009. The first Archivist search found 126 messages.

I stopped searching on November 1, 2009. At that point 330 messages had been found -- at least some seemed obviously generated for reasons other than the 8 soldiers.

The .txt file that can be read by Excel to acquire the data is: 8 troops killed afghanistan.txt