Monitor twitter hashtags in realtime with common search api?

Question

I've been working with the twitter search api, retrieving tweets with a php script run by a cron job, 3 or 4 times per hour.
All works fine, I can save some fields from the resulting tweets into mySQL for doing some research, contests, and accounting.

I begun experiencing some "trouble" some days ago when some hashtag hit Global Trending Topic, and the saved tweets werent't reflecting the real quantity of tweets We could see through search, etc.

So:

1- Should I use instead the twitter Streaming API?
2- Should I contact api AT twitter.com and request special permissions for my app or username?
3- Finally, is there a working way to acchieve this "realtime" monitoring script that can give more accurate and real results?

Thanks a lot in advance

Answer 1

Got a reply from twitter api staff...
It seems I should use STREAMING API, and they point me to this url

https://dev.twitter.com/docs/streaming-api/methods#track

Hope it is useful for others