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Twitter Search Now Indexes Every Public Tweet

After change that is rolling out in the next few days, users will be able to search though the full Twitter archive.

Martin Beck on November 18, 2014 at 4:41 pm

Twitter history will soon be more accessible. The company announced today that it is giving users the ability to search within the full archive of public tweets.

From a blog post by Twitter search infrastructure engineer Yi Zhuang:

Since that first simple Tweet over eight years ago, hundreds of billions of Tweets have captured everyday human experiences and major historical events. Our search engine excelled at surfacing breaking news and events in real time, and our search index infrastructure reflected this strong emphasis on recency. But our long-standing goal has been to let people search through every Tweet ever published.

Twitter search has long been incomplete because the company’s engineers focused on the real-time feed, about a week’s worth of public content on the service. Zhuang’s blog post goes into great detail about “how we built a search service that efficiently indexes roughly half a trillion documents and serves queries with an average latency of under 100ms.”

Twitter says the change will be rolling out on desktop and mobile app versions of Twitter in the next few days.

Read more coverage about the change on Marketing Land.

About The Author

Martin Beck

Martin Beck is Third Door Media's Social Media Reporter, covering the latest news for Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. He spent 24 years with the Los Angeles Times, serving as social media and reader engagement editor from 2010-2014. A graduate of UC Irvine and the University of Missouri journalism school, Beck started started his career at the Times as a sportswriter and copy editor. Follow Martin on Twitter (@MartinBeck), Facebook and/or Google+.