Twitter Opens Up Archive, Lets You Search All Tweets

According to Twitter, hundreds of billions of tweets have been sent out since the service launched in 2006. If you're dubious of that number, you can now count them all to verify the claim. Today, Twitter is announcing they're making the entire catalog of tweets sent available via their search index. Until today, the aim was on providing an account of the more recent tweets sent, but now they're all up for grabs. The new, all-encompassing index is also 100-times larger than the real-time index we've been using.

The tweet search archive being open means big things for events, according to Twitter. Searching hashtags no longer brings up the most recent tweets, but the entire scope of an event's happenings.

Giving full access is a great workaround for cutting through the noise, but we still don't get to actually cut through the noise on Twitter. We'll just have more tweets to wade through, which will bring the info we're probably looking for, just not as straightforward as we'd probably like.

Twitter isn't going to make it too clumsy, though. They'll use SSD to cut down on latency, which they think will be right around 100ms.

Still, as often as people turn to Twitter to blast information out to the world at large, access to every tweet ever is a great way to access the Internet is small snippets of info.

Source: Twitter