Tweeps, tweeters and country twolk, lend me your ears. I come to tweet about Twaesar, and to praise it. The public tweets that men and women do lives after them, forever indexed by Twitter and now publicly searchable.

There have been hundreds of billions of tweets since the first tweet over 8 years ago, from the mundane through to the majestic, allowing people around them to know what the heck is happening when no other online source knows.

I’ve used Twitter search in the past to figure out whether a particular online service is down, or what people are saying following earthquakes, or other major events, such as trying to see the recent red blood moon in Sydney, which sadly was obscured by clouds.

You can search for tweets in the search bar at the top of your Twitter page, or you can use the advanced Twitter search functionality that lets you dig deep through tweets about specific events and timelines, which can be very handy

While Twitter’s existing search engine was great at breaking news and other events in real time, as Twitter explained at its blog post on the topic, Twitter now lets people search through all the public tweets ever tweeted by the Twitterati.

Although the advanced search is available now, Twitter advises that the new capability ‘will be rolling out to users of the next few days’.

The rest of Twitter’s blog post describes how to company ‘built a search service that efficiently indexes roughly half a trillion documents and serves queries with an average latency of under 100ms’, so if you’re interested in knowing a lot more detail, it’s worth heading over there (link above!).

May the tweet, rinse and retweet be with you!