Twitter Enables Search for Old Tweets

Looking for a tweet that was posted more than a week ago? Twitter is rolling out a new search features that may help you find what you are looking for.

Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan wrote, “For ages now, Twitter has only allowed you to search for tweets back for about a week. Looking for a tweet older than that? You were out of luck, at least using Twitter itself. But now that’s changing. In a post today, Twitter says that some older tweets are now going to be available.”

But not all old tweets will be available. Computerworld’s Jeremy Kirk noted, “Over the next few days, searches will return ‘a fairly small percentage of total tweets ever sent’ but that will increase over time, wrote Paul Burstein, an engineer who works on Twitter’s search infrastructure, on a company blog. ‘We look at a variety of types of engagement, like favorites, retweets and clicks, to determine which tweets to show,’ Burstein wrote. ‘We’ll be steadily increasing this percentage over time, and ultimately, aim to surface the best content for your query.'”

Salvador Rodriguez with the Los Angeles Times explained, “There is a way to download all the tweets ever sent if so desired: In settings, go to section titled ‘Your Twitter archive’ and click ‘Request your archive’ to get the tweets.”

CNET’s Daniel Terdiman observed, “The announcement is the second this week aimed at letting users surface more content on Twitter. Yesterday, the company rolled out updates to its iOS and Android apps, as well as to mobile.twitter.com, designed to streamline the discovery process on Twitter.”