Now showing: Older Tweets in search results
Yesterday, 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. We also started to roll out an additional update on our mobile apps as well as on twitter.com: you'll now be able to find older Tweets using search.
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter has been building search beyond a reverse-chronological stream, adding photo-aware search in 2011, “Top News” and “Top People” result types later that year, and visual previews for photos and video in 2012. Extending the searchable window makes those result formats useful against a deeper archive rather than only the freshest conversation.
The update spans twitter.com and Twitter’s mobile clients, making search a more consistent retrieval surface across the places users encounter the service.
First-order effects
- Twitter users can retrieve older posts through search on the web and mobile apps, rather than limiting discovery to recent activity.
- Twitter makes its accumulated Tweet corpus more reusable, giving older posts a new path to be found after their original moment has passed.
Second-order effects
- A larger searchable corpus raises the importance of Twitter’s relevance choices: its earlier Top News and Top People features must help users distinguish timely results from older matches.
- Publishers, brands, and other active Twitter accounts gain a longer discovery tail for posts that remain relevant, while the service has more search inventory to surface to users.
Third-order effects
- If Twitter continues to expand retrieval rather than only real-time consumption, its public stream increasingly functions as a searchable archive whose value depends on ranking and presentation, not merely posting volume.
The trend: Twitter search is evolving from a tool for following the moment into a product for retrieving value from the platform’s growing historical record.