Twitter, the popular micro-blogging website, is making it easy for users to look into the past with its upgraded search function. The social network site is helping users to locate the oldest tweets using the regular search bar or the advanced search page. With this new change, Twitter is opening up its massive archive of half a trillion tweets, including the ones that were sent out since the company's inception in 2006.
The enhanced search feature, the Tweet Index, will be available across all platforms including web and mobile, the company revealed in an official blog post on Tuesday. Previously, Twitter allowed users to sift through the most recent tweets dating back to just a few days before disappearing into the ether. The change will be rolled out to all users over the next few days. Android and iOS app users will be able to take advantage of the new and improved search feature from their smartphones.
"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's Search Infrastructure Engineer, Yi Zhuang, wrote in a lengthy post explaining the new change. "This new infrastructure enables many use cases, providing comprehensive results for entire TV and sports seasons, conferences, industry discussions places, businesses and long-lived hashtag conversations."
Looking back in history, Twitter has constantly tried to upgrade its search feature to make it more productive. But the latest change is the biggest in the history of Twitter, PC World reports. In 2011, the company introduced search and has since improved to include features like auto-complete and suggested results. Two years ago, Twitter allowed users to search for tweets up to seven days old.
Twitter's improvement does not change the way people look for tweets. Users can still search through words and hashtags to locate tweets. With a preferred date range, users can look up tweets with certain words at that particular time, like the 2012 elections or the epic World Cup Final.
