In a blog post published today, Twitter announced that every tweet sent since 2006 is indexed and can be searched in the Twitter apps for the web and mobile devices.
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.
The blog post shares the technical details behind the technology (an impressive scale and undoubtedly a huge challenge), but I was more curious to try the user-facing aspect of indexed tweets and search in the official app for iOS.
For me, there’s tremendous value in being able to easily retrieve old tweets: I’ve written about the Twitter archive before, but today’s rollout brings retrieval of indexed tweets to the search section of the Twitter app – no need to download an archive. Twitter search used to be limited to tweets from the past couple of weeks; now, you can look for every public tweet sent since 2006.
