Twitter Search Upgrades

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Notice any differences to the Twitter search engine? Finding things faster? Getting more results? The changes are subtle, but the latest upgrade to Twitter lets users search for more information a little faster. Twitter reportedly gets 1,000 tweets per second and 1 billion queries on their site per day. Their old software, developed in 2008, was so two years ago and just wasn’t made for that kind of volume. So, Twitter decided it was out with the old and in with the newer, more efficient media.

The new engine, written in Java, is called Lucene. Of course, Twitter developers didn’t take it at face value, and made a few tweets †I mean tweaks †of their own. Twitter developers wanted users to be able to be able to tweet and have it show up in the search engine right away. Waiting a minute for users to find out Sally was at Starbucks getting a latte was unacceptable. So, they streamlined the time it takes for tweets to show up in the search index to less than 10 seconds after being posted.

Now users searching for a specific topic can find literally the ...
... most up to date information in no more time. Additionally, the new feature didn’t bog the system down, producing even more results quickly.

With little to no interruption for users, Twitter was able to implement the new search engine and streamline the internal searching process. This makes room for developers to add all kinds of new search features in the future. Only 5 percent of Twitter’s available back-end resources are currently being used. This boils down to 50 times more Tweets than the old engine could handle, and a lot of room for expansion.

So, how do these changes affect the day to day tweet-er? Not a whole lot just yet. Users will see a longer index (twice as many results as the old engine) with shorter load times when using Twitter’s search feature. The main reason for making these upgrades was to make more room for new features Twitter users don’t even know they need yet.