Do you ever wish that you could look up tweets that were posted months, even years, prior? Now you can, thanks to Twitter’s new catalog of messages that has been opened. With over 500 billion documents, the new search engine can sift through the tweets, some of which were created over 8 years ago when the social site was first launched. Today, Twitter has some 284 million monthly active users.
Twitter is known and loved for its ability to share breaking news and events in real time. Pull up your news feed at any time of the day, and you’ll be shown the latest updates from the people and brands you follow. This format is what allows conversation to happen, important news and events to be shared, and people to feel connected with what’s going on right now. At the same time, it’s also easy to miss things.
As a marketer, you can post a link to your followers about a sneak peak of a new product and reach all the people that are on Twitter at the moment. Yet those who are not on won’t see the tweet, unless they deliberately search for it. This means that marketers post more frequently on the site because a) it’s far less annoying than, say, multiple Facebook posts would be and b) it’s necessary for expanding reach.
Since it’s acceptable to post as many times a day as you see fit, it’s understandable how so many tweets get posted in a single day. And many of them are mindless. For general users, the number of posts may not be a big deal, but companies want to be represented in the best light possible. Now that all tweets can be searched, you certainly don’t want old problems or incidents coming back. Now is a good time for you to go back into your account and delete tweets that are dubious or embarrassing.
The new search engine has expanded gracefully, with roughly half a trillion documents that can be indexed. The new index is 100 times larger than the previous one and grows by billions of tweets each week.
