Twitter To Enable Older Tweet Search

Twitter has started to roll out an update to its website that will enable users to search through the “older” tweets left on the platform. Previously, the users were only allowed to search through the messages that were posted in the past week.

The company has also updated the Android, iOS and mobile Web apps to make it easier to find “relevant content”.

Eventually, Twitter hopes to index the majority of messages published on its platform, but says it will focus on providing “the best content”, and not simply maintaining an archive of all tweets ever made.

The brand new old content

“We updated our Android, iOS and mobile web apps to make it easier for you to find relevant content when you’re on the go,” wrote Paul Burstein, a Search Infrastructure engineer, on the Twitter blog.

The company has also unlocked older tweets, but the search functionality is still limited, and works with only a fraction of the tweets left on the platform since its launch in 2006.

“We look at a variety of types of engagement, like favourites, retweets and clicks, to determine which Tweets to show,” explained Burstein. He said that the company plans to increase the number of indexed messages over time, but didn’t mention anything about searching the complete archive.

Meanwhile on the mobile devices, Twitter now features all of the content – including tweets, activity, trends and suggestions of accounts to follow – in a single stream. In a similar manner, the search results now also feature a mix of tweets, photos, and accounts.

Earlier this week, it was reported that Twitter could be planning to introduce two-factor authentication, after it was forced to reset passwords of 250,000 accounts due to a security breach.

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