Their goal has been to provide users with the ability to comb through every public tweet ever made. Around “half a trillion documents” have been generated by Twitter users since 2006. Tweet Index searches average was estimated at under 100 milliseconds in time to deliver results. More recent tweets are stored in RAM to provide fast updates. This project was developed in steps. The new Twitter search engine is limited to rather rudimentary keyword searches today. However, the search capabilities will be increased into more complex queries in the months and years to come. Tweet Index project was initiated by Paul Burstein and a team of engineers at Twitter. Their work was very innovative. The search infrastructure laid down by the company will be eventually used to drive other Twitter tools in the future.
