Twitter Improves Search Technology
Twitter is investing in search — their own search that is.
The company recently announced via their blog that they were rolling out new enhancements that would improve the service's excellent query serving capacity and its search engine.
The Improved Search Technology
The upgraded search technology is more efficient and faster and the implementation has been taking place over the past few weeks, according to the company. The improvements aren't just about a new “look-and-feel” but rather about the end result, i.e. search results.
The improved search algorithm will crawl billions of tweets and show you the appropriate results within a few seconds or even less. According to reports, Twitter is confident about the efficiency of their search technology, which apparently has enough horsepower to handle 50 times the amount of data that currently flows in via tweets.
One major change that the search functionality brings is the use of an "inverted index" (more about inverted indexing can be found here).
Want to check the past tweets?
There were some discussions about the drawback of Twitter’s own search engine. Over time it became difficult to search tweets that were few days old. By mid-January, it became almost impossible to find any tweets posted on New Year’s Day on Twitter. Twitter later clarified that it didn’t have the capacity to store older ones for searching.
Twitter search wasn’t capable of finding tweets more than four days old. But today, with this new functionality, you can search “twice as long." My tests were able to find relevant Tweets from seven days ago.
Relevant facts about the numbers
Here are some interesting facts as it relates to content on Twitter and search indexing.
• There are over 1,000 tweets per second
• There are 12,000 queries per second
• There are over 1 billion queries per day (1,036,800,000 per day)
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