Twitter’s search engine just got a lot more comprehensive. It’s long been a helpful tool for real-time search, but now it’s going to be a lot better at surfacing historic content.
The company announced on Tuesday that it now indexes every public tweet since 2006. This functionality is rolling out to users over the next few days.
Twitter’s Yi Zhuang says in a blog post, “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.”
Complete results from the full index will appear in the “All” tab of search results on the Twitter web client and on iOS and Android. As time goes on, more tweets from the index will start appearing in the “Top” tab of search results, as well as in new product experiences.
“The full index is a major infrastructure investment and part of ongoing improvements to the search and discovery experience on Twitter,” says Zhuang. “There is still more exciting work ahead, such as optimizations for smart caching.”
Twitter takes a super-deep dive into the technical aspects of how the index was accomplished here, so if you’re into back-end, give that a look.
Image via Twitter
