Twitter search now pulls in posts older than a week

Looks like Twitter’s on a bit of an update streak. The dust had barely settled on the updates to its Android and iOS apps when the social network announced that it would also be updating its search function to include older tweets.

In an official blog post, Twitter announced that you will now be able to see tweets older than a week in your search results.

The social network does however caution that the tweets that you’ll see in search results represent a fairly small percentage of total tweets ever sent. That number will however grow as Twitter’s memory improves.

Twitter claims that it looks at a variety of types of engagement, like favourites, retweets and clicks, to determine which tweets to show. It will be steadily increasing this percentage over time, and ultimately, aims to surface the best content for your query.

Right off the top of our heads we think anyone running a competition on the social network and investigative journalists are just two of the groups who will be happy about the announcement. The ability to find older tweets using search makes research on the social network significantly easier and can only win Twitter brownie points with its users.