For those hoping their early tweets were lost to the annals of the Internet, they may be coming back with a vengeance. Twitter's latest update will allow anyone to find your past Twitter life.
Twitter announced on Nov. 18 that it now indexes every tweet sent since 2006 when the social network first launched. The company is now making it easier to search through the hundreds of billions of tweets sent through the years. Twitter will roll out the new search engine during the next few days.
We're rolling out the ability to search for every Tweet ever published. Learn about how we built this https://t.co/KhbgVHZtYE #TwitterSearch
— Twitter Engineering (@TwitterEng) November 18, 2014
Users have employed search.twitter.com to scour through the mass of tweets, but it was always a tricky process if you were looking for something a Twitter user posted a couple of years ago. There were also third-party tools, such as Topsy, which is owned by Apple, but there was also a learning curve attached to these resources.
Twitter's search engine was initially created to allow people to simply search through what people are tweeting now, not what they tweeted in the past. To do this, Twitter would remove every tweet from its index about a week after it was posted. But in 2012, Twitter developed a small index of approximately two billion top tweets.
But now you can search for any tweet in Twitter's 8-year-old archive. However, the search engine doesn't seem new so much as just an updated version of Twitter's Advanced Search option, although it is nice that it extends so far back now. In the same way as the Advanced Search engine operated, you can search based on keywords, who sent the tweets, specific timestamps and even sentiment, although that can sometimes get a little tricky to recognize accurately in text-based data.
The search engine is of course far from perfect in its early stages. I still think it's not the most user-friendly option to search Twitter's massive archive, but it is a decent option and a change I'm sure many people are happy to see. Twitter didn't even have a search engine for recent tweets until 2011, according to WIRED.
Twitter goes into a lot of technical detail about how its new search engine actually works in a post on its Engineering Blog, in case you're interested. What's clear to even non-developers is that the process of creating a search engine for Twitter could not have been easy. The full index is about 100 times larger than Twitter's real-time index, and it gets even larger to the tune of about several billion tweets a week.
The company plans on finding ways to enable users to perform more complex searches in the future and not just input keywords. It might also help Twitter develop new tools in the future, Gilad Mishne, who helped oversee the project, told WIRED.
What effect will this have on Twitter and its tweeps? Well, there's the aforementioned possibility of people more easily finding some of your early tweets you'd rather not have them see. But there are greater implications for the tool, such as investigators could use older tweets as evidence for crimes or journalists could use them to get a better sense of who newsworthy individuals really are. This new search engine even allows Twitter to be even more of a digital time capsule by allowing us to see the general public sentiment surrounding a topic and how it compares to now.
If nothing else, it could just feed your need for nostalgia by taking a historic look at your own tweets. Any excuse for a little introspection is a good one.
