Twitter now indexing every tweet, ever. #comprehensive

19 Nov 2014

Microblogging giant Twitter is now indexing every tweet since the site’s creation in 2006, making users’ searches on the network so much easier.

Hundreds of billions of tweets have been sent out since Twitter formed, covering everything from marmalade choices to uprisings in Arab states. TV series have been built up and broken down through the strength of globally sourced opinion, cut down into easily digestible, terribly spelled sentences.

Whereas before many of these tweets disappeared after time – although there were other services out there to help you seek out a missing message – now, with this announcement, there’s a ‘forever’ record kept by Twitter itself.

Through a series of data aggregation processes, the social media giant has developed a way to allow for far easier navigation through its own back catalogue of tweets.

“Our long-standing goal has been to let people search through every Tweet ever published,” says Twitter.

“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.”

The advanced search is pretty cool, if even for a random look into the minds of Twitterers over the years. Give it a go.

Gordon Hunt was a journalist with Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com