8 Years Of Public Tweets Will Be Searchable

Whether you use Twitter on a personal or professional basis, one of the most common reservations is likely that if you wanted to find a past tweet when looking up a trend or a conversation bound together by a hashtag, you’d probably have to use a third-party app since Twitter would only let you search to tweets posted a maximum of a week in the past.

Data engineers at Twitter noticed the growing discomfort by users at not being able to find this information using Twitter alone. Originally, Twitter built its search engine to provide quick access to what people are tweeting right now, and not necessarily to what they’ve tweeted in the past. That meant that Twitter was removing all tweets from its search after approximately a week. Not the best-case scenario for those who wanted to search for old tweets out of curiosity, or even research. To compensate, people had been using third- party applications and websites, such as Google, Topsy (owned by Apple) and Tweet Machine, which many people still use to this day.

In 2011, the data engineering team began a project that would eventually have users be able to search an index of every single tweet posted since the service started in 2006. After many years of development, trial and error, Twitter announced via a blog post this week from the engineering team about the impending rollout for its search service that lets you search for any tweet in its archive. In the same fashion as Google, who had reconfigured its search engine to be able to handle the most recent of internet posts alongside much older data, and in the process completely changing the systems that power its search engine, Twitter is finally addressing and filling a need it created on its own.

The search function gives people access to the billions of tweets beginning this week and rolling out over the next few days–100 times larger than the live index and continues to grow by billions of tweets a week. At first, full index results will appear in the “All” tab in Twitter search on the web and on iOS/Android apps more tweets in the index will also appear in the “Top” search results. Amazingly, the search time through the billions of tweets will likely take less than 100 milliseconds.

Perhaps the best part of the search function is what was stated by Twitter search engineer Yi Zhang:

“…users will be able to pull up “comprehensive results for entire TV and sports seasons, conferences industry discussions, places, businesses and long-lived hashtag conversation across topics, such as #JapanEarthquake, #HongKong, #Ferguson, and many more”.

This is great news for those businesses looking to improve their SEO strategy, as the search engine provides an excellent research opportunity to find out what’s trending, as well as how they can make their content searchable. Hashtag conversations and trends provide marketers valuable information to see what their audience is thinking about and a rich history of searchable tweets. You may even be able to track the ebb and flow of trends based on various periods of the year, in recent history when put in comparison to certain world events, and much more.

Twitter’s opening of its archives is a win-win-win situation; Twitter has found yet another way for its users to stay engaged within the service, rather than relying on third-party apps to find old tweets, whether out of curiosity or research; businesses and marketers are able to modify their content and SEO strategies to reflect the wishes of those who they intend to cater to; and users are also armed with knowledge when searching for information regarding anything—including those tweets posted by businesses and creating a way for them to find out more about the businesses they want to interact with.