Twitter makes every tweet available for search

CMO Innovation editors
21 Nov 2014
00:00

Users will now be able to search for every one of a half-trillion tweets sent since Twitter was launched in 2006. The announcement was made on Tuesday by Yi Zhuang, an engineer at the search infrastructure team at popular social media platform.

In a blog post, Zhuang explained that while Twitter had excelled at surfacing breaking news and events in real time, the long-standing goal had always been to let people search through every tweet ever published.

It is with this in mind that the team re-engineered Twitter to “efficiently” index and resolve queries with an average latency of under 100ms. As an example, a ping query to the New York Times website generates an average latency of just over 200ms from Singapore.

The upgrade is now completed and will be rolled out to users over the next few days.

The ability to search through all tweets is a huge improvement for users. Twitter had in the past removed tweets from the public search index after only a week or so, and the company’s tweet archive was only made available to selected partners. For users, it means that they can search by keyword or hashtag, and select a time frame or Twitter account to further fine-tune their search results.

“This new infrastructure enables many use cases, providing comprehensive results for entire TV and sports seasons, conferences (#TEDGlobal), industry discussions (#MobilePayments), places, businesses and long-lived hashtag conversations across topics, such as #JapanEarthquake, #Election2012, #ScotlandDecides, #HongKong, #Ferguson and many more,” wrote Zhuang.

Ultimately, the full index is a major, ongoing infrastructure investment. Twitter says its efforts is expected to drive development of new features and tools in other areas of the platform. And while the search engine is rather basic right now, the company says it has plans to expand into complex queries in the future.

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