Count number of results for a particular word on Twitter

Question

To further a personal project of mine, I have been pondering how to count the number of results for a user specified word on Twitter. I have used their API extensively, but

Answer 1

net but I have made recursive function to call search query again and again until I don't find word "page=" in result.

Answer 2

I'm able to go back about a week. I start my search with the parameters that Adam posted and then key off of the smallest id in the set of search results, like so, http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?lang=en&q=iphone&rpp=100&max_id= where max_id = the min(id) of the 100 results I just pulled.