What is the history of Twitter's search history?

[AdamD]

It appears that Twitter search is down to four days of backlog now. It
was five days a couple weeks ago. And in the back of my memory there
was once months of search history.

Is there a record anywhere of changes to the history? And I think I
understand the purpose of decreasing the history, but is there an
official reason for the changes?

Thanks,
Adam DuVander
ProgrammableWeb

[Tom van der Woerdt]

Hello Adam,

I think I can give you an explanation.

Twitter will only search through, for example, 50 million tweets. If this becomes more, then the search becomes slow.

For the same reason it will only index interesting tweets. You wouldn't want 40 million of this 50 million to be spam ;-)

Tom

Sent from my iPod

[Nick Arnett]

On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 11:43 AM, Tom van der Woerdt <in...@tvdw.eu> wrote:

For the same reason it will only index interesting tweets. You wouldn't want 40 million of this 50 million to be spam ;-)

Wow. When our computers can calculate what is interesting to us, our world will be transformed... But I know what you meant.

I've been trying to get computers to show me interesting things for decades, but they aren't getting much smarter about it.

Oh, for a button that says "Show me only interesting stuff" that works!

Nick

[Tom van der Woerdt]

Sorry - I wanted to keep my e-mail short because I was typing from my
bike - but you are right. That would be awesome :-)

Tom

[Matt Harris]

To add to this, the exact search index is related to the frequency of Tweets and their relevance. The role of search.twitter.com is to provide a real-time, relevant search of what is being discussed on Twitter now instead of an archival search through the history of Twitter. A good resource to understand what isn't indexed in search is this help article:

  http://support.twitter.com/groups/32-something-s-not-working/topics/118-search/articles/66018-my-tweets-or-hashtags-are-missing-from-search-known-issue

To answer your question about the search index history, we don't publish that information. The size of the index fluctuates based on the number of Tweets being made which means, the more Tweets there are the shorter the index period is. 

We're working to improve the duration of the search index and improve the relevance of the results.

Best,

Matt

--


Matt Harris
Developer Advocate, Twitter
http://twitter.com/themattharris

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

--
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
http://borasky-research.net http://twitter.com/znmeb

"A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems." - Paul Erdos

Quoting Nick Arnett <nick....@gmail.com>:

+1

--
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
http://borasky-research.net http://twitter.com/znmeb

"A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems." - Paul Erdos

[Nick Arnett]

On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 12:02 PM, Tom van der Woerdt <in...@tvdw.eu> wrote:

Sorry - I wanted to keep my e-mail short because I was typing from my
bike -

Wow, you DO have advanced technology!

Nick