Popular micro-blogging site, Twitter, has just updated its search feature and it now displays older tweets in the results page. This is an improvement over the previous version which showed tweets that had been made up to a week ago but nothing past that point. The week limit has been removed but Twitter has not given out the details of how far back the search results will go. However, it is clear that the new search results show older tweets based on several factors including the popularity of a tweet. More details about the feature was revealed by Twitter’s Paul Burstein in a blog post he authored about the upgrade. He mentions that, “We look at a variety of types of engagement, like favorites, retweets and clicks, to determine which Tweets to show. We’ll be steadily increasing this percentage over time, and ultimately, aim to surface the best content for your query.”
The feature went live on Wednesday, February 6 even though Twitter’s official announcement came on Thursday, February 7. The new search is available for the sites online version and also mobile versions including the iOS and Android applications.
Twitter will keep adding to this feature and for now users will only see a small slice of the total tweets sent in the past. Burstein mentions that, “As we roll this out over the coming days, the Tweets that you’ll see in search results represent a fairly small percentage of total Tweets ever sent.” However he assures users that, “We’ll be steadily increasing this percentage over time, and ultimately, aim to surface the best content for your query.”
Twitter also had some other updates to make including an interesting “single stream” view that will show “most relevant mix of tweets, photos, and accounts” all in one place as a “single scrollable timeline.” This new feature seems to be similar to the Facebook Timeline.
Twitter has in the past resisted showing users tweets from the past. The startup may have done so because it is trying to save space and not bog it self down with the incredible amount of data its 200 million monthly active users produce. According to Twitter, the site’s user base generates 1 billion tweets every 2.5 days. It is no surprise then that Twitter looks to find better ways to search and reveal the relevant data from this massive amount of information being generated by users around the world.
Source: Mashable
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