Micro-blogging site Twitter has launched a search engine to help users search through tweets. The company's search infrastructure engineer Yi Zhuang said the search service efficiently indexes roughly half a trillion documents and “serves queries with an average latency of under 100 milliseconds”.
The feature allows users to search through every tweet sent on the service since 2006 when Twitter was launched.
“Since that first simple Tweet over eight years ago, hundreds of billions of Tweets have captured everyday human experiences and major historical events,” Mr. Zhuang said.
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
“Our search engine excelled at surfacing breaking news and events in real time, and our search index infrastructure reflected this strong emphasis on recency. But our long-standing goal has been to let people search through every Tweet ever published,” he added.
According to the company, the change will soon be available on desktop and mobile app versions of Twitter.