Twitter lets you search through any tweet ever sent

Twitter has long maintained a searchable index of recent tweets, about a week’s worth of tweets updated in real time. But they’ve now adopted that indexing technology to allow you to search from a database of every tweet ever sent, starting with this one.

To read about the technology behind this new index, click here.

Far more interesting is Twitter’s advanced search page. Take it for a spin.

As an example, use the date fields at the bottom to search from March 21, 2006 through April 30, 2006 (a span of 40 days) for the word pizza. To move back a year at a time, click in the date field, then click the date at the top of the popup. Click again to move back a decade at a time.

This search should yield 11 tweets, not including the promoted tweet. If you search for pizza between Jan 1 through Jan 7, 2007 (a span of 7 days) you’ll get 28 hits. Not particularly scientific, but it is interesting to see the growth of Twitter. If and when Twitter opens this up as an API, would be interesting to build an app that maps search terms over time.