Entire archive of tweets from 2006 now searchable on Twitter

By Staff Reporter - 19 Nov '14 02:23AM

Twitter, the giant micro-blogging company, announced that it has launched a new, searchable index of every public tweet ever made since the company first launched the popular service in 2006.

The "Tweet Index", as it is being referred to, is available on both the web and mobile platforms and is offered to users via an "All" tab near the search bar.

The announcement was made on Tuesday by Yi Zhuang, an engineer at the search infrastructure team at popular social media platform.

In a blog post, Zhuang explained that while Twitter had excelled at surfacing breaking news and events in real time, the long-standing goal had always been to let people search through every tweet ever published.

Twitter users were given the option in 2012 to download their personal library of tweets, however the new search capability is also ideal for quickly finding anything from your tenure on Twitter.

Though the new Twitter search engine is limited to rather rudimentary keyword searches today, the company plans to expand into more complex queries in the months and years to come.

"This new infrastructure enables many use cases, providing comprehensive results for entire TV and sports seasons, conferences (#TEDGlobal), industry discussions (#MobilePayments), places, businesses and long-lived hashtag conversations across topics, such as #JapanEarthquake, #Election2012, #ScotlandDecides, #HongKong, #Ferguson and many more," wrote Zhuang.

witter says its efforts is expected to drive development of new features and tools in other areas of the platform. And while the search engine is rather basic right now, the company says it has plans to expand into complex queries in the future.