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.
For now, complete results from the full index will appear in the “All” tab of search results on the Twitter web client and Twitter for iOS & Twitter for Android apps. Over time, you’ll see more Tweets from this index appearing in the “Top” tab of search results and in new product experiences powered by this index. Try it out: you can search for the first Tweets about New Years between Dec. 30, 2006 and Jan. 2, 2007.
Yi Zhuang
Great news from Twitter: finally a search engine for all public tweets since 2006! I have the feeling this will be an area where Twitter will continue to experiment and expand, to deliver more exciting updates in the future. Google may yet see its dominance in web search threatened, if Twitter develops a reliable ranking algorithm for the links and content shared here every second of every day. Twitter could start crawling web pages as well, connecting them to the follower graph to build the first successful social search engine – something both Google and Facebook failed to do.
It’s ironic that a couple of years ago Google was providing real-time search for Twitter. That deal ended because Google started building their own social and interest network, Google+, with little success. Left without Google’s support, Twitter focused on their own search project – and the results are starting to show. Inadvertently, Google may have caused the emergence of its first real competitor in years.
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