Twitter announced the remarkable achievement of indexing half a trillion tweets Tuesday, meaning that those obsessed with playing games of “gotcha” on the social network have a powerful new toy.
The undertaking makes every public tweet since 2006 searchable, an incredible infrastructure feat that almost certainly will be used for unearthing off-hand comments made by one-time obscure people five years ago, opposition research in politics, and holding tweeps accountable for embarrassing predictions they made about the 2012 phenomenon.
“Our search engine excelled at surfacing breaking news and events in real time, and our search index infrastructure reflected this strong emphasis on recency,” Twitter wrote in a blog post. “But our long-standing goal has been to let people search through every Tweet ever published.”
The new advanced search engine allows people to browse tweets by content — including word combinations, hashtags and smileys (seriously) — account, location, and date.
Twitter noted that some of the search functionality will be rolling out to users “over the next few days.”
Read more about it here, and try it for yourself here.
