Last year, Twitter updated its search feature to enable users to search every tweet ever tweeted. Now, they’re making all of these tweets available via a new search API – the Full-Archive Search API.

Twitter acquired GNIP (also last year) to make data more accessible, and with the new API they’re doing just that. In fact, it builds on products already offered via GNIP. Twitter’s Adam Tornes explains in a blog post:

Dr. Carl Sagan once famously said, “You have to know the past to understand the present.” For brands to most effectively analyze Twitter data in the present, they also need to know what’s happened in the past. This is the case whether you’re talking about messaging and advertising campaigns or developing new products. Gnip’s Historical PowerTrack and 30-Day Search API tools were developed with these pressing customer needs in mind. Today we’re extending our historical product offerings with the launch of our Full-Archive Search API.

This new product builds off of our existing 30-Day search solution and extends the available window of instant and complete Twitter access to a span of more than nine years… and counting. The Full-Archive Search API will now allow Gnip customers to immediately search for any historical public Tweet — ever.

The offering is geared toward enterprises and is considered a premium feature. In other words, it’s not just free to everyone.

Twitter says partners can use the API to inform new product launches, create instant real-time data activity benchmarks for ad campaigns, provide instant historical insights to new customers of analytics solutions, and explore historical Twitter activity for context when responding to customer service inquiries.

This is actually the second announcement from Twitter in the past week that gives enterprises tools to improve customer service. The company partnered with Sprout Social on a new suite of tools to help brands provide better customer service. This concerns a pilot of programmatic access to impression and engagements data, which is aimed at helping brands prioritize conversations, get insights, and measure audience. Oracle will release a related solution soon, Twitter says. More on that here.

Image via Garrett Heath, Flickr Creative Commons