Twitter lets you search every tweet ever published Twitter has introduced a new feature that allows users to search through every tweet ever published since the service launched in 2006. Twitter has always kept tweets, but before now users needed a third-party tools like Topsy to search back through older tweets. The new search index allows users to search through Twitter's massive inventory of roughly half a trillion tweets. Results to search queries are delivered with an average latency of under 100 milliseconds. Twitter's search index supports many use cases, according to Twitter, providing comprehensive results for entire TV and sports seasons, conferences, industry discussions, places and businesses. It can also be used to revive long-lived hashtag conversations across topics, such as #JapanEarthquake, #Election2012, #ScotlandDecides, #HongKong and #Ferguson. Although the new Twitter search index is limited to rudimentary keyword searches today, the company plans to expand into more complex queries in the months and years to come. "Our search engine excelled at surfacing breaking news and events in real time, and our search index infrastructure reflected this strong emphasis on recency," said Twitter engineer Yi Zhuang in a blog post. But our long-standing goal has been to let people search through every Tweet ever published.