The first tweet was written almost 9 years ago and looked like this:
just setting up my twttr
— Jack (@jack) March 21, 2006
In that time Twitter reckons that hundreds of billions of tweets have been created. Some of them were milestones in the way that information was diffused to the public at large:
http://twitpic.com/135xa – There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.
— J?nis Kr?ms (@jkrums) January 15, 2009
As Twitter says in a blog article – Building a Complete Tweet Index – the company has always excelled at delivering real-time search results – if you want to find out what’s happening in a football game or today’s news, you may go to the search box on your desktop or mobile device or even click on the trending topics.
However, if you’re looking for something more detailed or want to search further back in time, you may be better off trying the advanced search which now allows you to search the ENTIRE Twitter index right back to 2006. This can be a hugely powerful tool for researching, analysing, identifying trends, exploring hashtags (historically), spotting opportunities, keeping an eye on your competitors (or citizens!) and much more. Twitter has maintained that it has always been the goal of the company to offer users the ability to search the entire database. And now you are able to just do that and ‘interrogate’ around half a trillion documents in their index!
This is what the interface looks like:
As you can see it allows you to search by using a number of fields and means you can carry out some quite advanced searches based:
- Keywords – including phrases, negatives and exact matches
- Hashtags
- Named accounts – including correspondence between accounts
- Location
- Dates and
- Sentiments
So, let’s say that we wanted to find out how Robert Scoble’s (Tech commentator) thoughts on “Google Glass” have evolved over the past 3 years we conduct the search and we can go through the (hundreds) of tweets that he has done since 6th April, 2012. There are conversations, discussions on privacy, styles, ways of use, apps you can use with it, video examples and much more. Everything that Robert Scoble has written about on Twitter can now be indexed for whatever reason you wish.
Just imagine how you could be using this advanced search tool for your own business. Here are some ideas to get you started:
Words
> All these words: Recipes
People
> Sainsburys
Words
> All these words: Real Madrid
> None of the words: Ronaldo
People
>Skyfootball
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