In a move that some people believe should have happened years ago, Twitter has finally indexed their public tweets and made them searchable for their users. Approximately 500 Billion posts are now searchable. In the past, Twitter limited the searchable Tweets to about 2 billion ‘top tweets’ that were primarily just the most recent tweets that people were making.
According to Twitter’s search engineer, Yi Zhung, users will be able to access and read a “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.”
This is going to be a very interesting type of search, since it will have to allow searching by hash tags as well as a number of other things like topics and the content of the tweets. Also, displaying the results may need to include things like retweets, responses and much more.
Twitter says that this feature will be rolling out to their entire community over the next few days, and can be seen in the All tab at first. This will be for both the iOS and Android apps.
