Twitter Search Fast Growing? Why Cut from 10 days to 5?

In July, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone declared, to much media splash, that Twitter is the world’s fastest growing search engine.

In May, I started noticing that Twitter search, that formerly extended back 10 days, was only going back 4-5 days. What gives, Biz? If it’s growing so fast, why cut back the time of searches?

Eric Rumsey is at: eric-rumseytemp AttSign uiowa dott edu and on Twitter @ericrumseytemp

0 thoughts on “Twitter Search Fast Growing? Why Cut from 10 days to 5?”

Hi Eric – you got us thinking about real-time search depth, Tweet archiving and reaching all the way back, which is what we’re trying to do with Replyz. We posted an in-depth response here: http://blog.replyz.com/?p=104 Please let us know your thoughts. Thanks.

Thanks Replyz, for the comment and the mention on your blog. I’m excerpting from your article there:

Eric Rumsey of Seeing the Picture posts that Twitter search is only extending back five days now, while it used to extend back at least ten. I wasn’t aware of that specific drop in half, but I had noticed in the last few days that after paging back in Twitter search results, I often hit a dead end, generally on page four or five or so with: “We’re givin’ ya all she’s got, Captain! Please wait a moment and try again.” I figured it was just like the fail wail, but now I wonder if this is related to the lessened archive-reach Eric has noticed.

Either way, I imagine this is volume-related, and only temporary. …

Eric says: I’ve been noticing this consistently since May, so I doubt that it’s temporary.

Use Topsy …

Taken from Mike Cane’s Twitter reply to this article:

mikecane: @ericrumseytemp Use http://topsy.com/ <- it goes back months!

Thanks for responding Eric. Yeah, you’re right, three months at 5 days would seem to indicate a permanent pattern. Noticed something was up, but hadn’t put a number on it until I saw your post. Btw, have you seen Google Realtime? Will be interesting to see how far back they go…