Twitter’s memory is about to get a lot better.
The company announced today that it has indexed all public tweets and will be giving users the ability to search through the full body of Twitter’s roughly half trillion posts.
Twitter’s search has long been incomplete because the company’s engineers focused on sifting through real-time output. The real-time search engine, an inverted index of about a week’s worth of tweets, has been supplemented since 2012 with about 2 billion “top tweets” and in 2013 that link was made more robust.
Now Twitter has completed the task of incorporating the full archive — which is more than 100 times larger than the live index and grows by several billion tweets a week — beginning with @Jack’s first message on the network.
And as Twitter search engineer Yi Zhuang noted in a blog post, users will be able to pull up “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.”
Presumably, it will also make it easier to find iconic tweets like the one below by President Obama, which is still easier to find with a Google search.
Four more years. pic.twitter.com/bAJE6Vom — Barack Obama (@BarackObama) November 7, 2012
The company says the new search capability will roll out in the next few days. At first the full index results will appear in the “All” tab in Twitter search on the web and on iOS and Android apps. Over time, more tweets in the index will also appear in the “Top” search results.
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