• Search Engine Land, Thursday, October 7, 2010 12:37 PM

Attention all Twitter-focused search experts: Having successfully served a billion queries, the top micro-blogging platform has made some serious changes to its back-end search software. "It's a change to the actual 'engine' that lets you search, the software that takes your query, hunts through billions of tweets and brings back answers," writes Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan.

What do the changes mean for non-search experts? More reliable searches, for one. "Twitter says its new technology will last it for years and has enough horsepower to handle 50 times the amount of data that currently flows in via tweets," Sullivan notes. According to Sullivan, one of the shortcomings with Twitter's existing search engine was that, over time, it's become harder to search back past a few days. In other words, there wasn't the capacity to store older tweets for searching, Twitter admits. If somewhat vague about the change, Twitter insists that the new system will let users search "twice as long."

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