Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) has made an amazing change to its site with an update that allows users to find any and every public tweet made in the past eight years, either by them or by any other person. That covers Twitter’s ever-growing database of a half trillion tweets.
Useful update from Twitter
No change has been made to the search functionality, so the major noticeable change is that the tool now displays all relevant results. The results displayed earlier were dominated by the tweets that were the latest and had the highest engagement levels.
“Our long-standing goal has been to let people search through every Tweet ever published,” Yi Zhuang, a search infrastructure engineer at Twitter, said in a blog post.
The improved infrastructure makes it easier to search for an entire conversation that took place around any topic, like a sports season, a conference or a trending hashtag, such as #Ferguson, says Zhuang.
In 2012, Twitter introduced a feature that allows users to download their personal library of tweets. Similarly, the new search capability could be used for finding anything tweeted during the tenure spent by any user on the platform.
New feature to help users stay updated
Now digging up the past of any user is very simple, as users simply need to enter the name of the user, along with a keyword for searching the relevant tweets made by that particular user.
Twitter Inc’s strengths lie in its speed and immediacy. The users’ Timelines get updated at a very fast pace with the latest happenings and updates taking place, and users are bound to miss some important events or updates that take place. Therefore, the new tool will also help users to stay updated.
Solving the problem of displaying all the results and balancing archival retrieval with the need to search and surface recent tweets did not come easy for the company. The blog post from Yi Zhuang includes lot many details about Twitter Inc’s journey of making a search engine that is pervasive and ever expanding. The wonderful part is that in doing so, Twitter didn’t go bankrupt and stayed focused.
