Looking for old tweets? You won’t find any that are more than a week or so old on Twitter. Put the blame on all the massive number of new tweets coming in. The engines, they canna hold captain! Or that is, the search index behind Twitter Search can’t hold it all.
From Where Have All The Old Tweets Gone?, an article I found when I noticed that tweets older than 6 days were not showing up in Twitter search results. It’s curious that the article (published in January 2010) concludes the 6 day throttle because I only just noticed this problem on May 24 – I tweet about #mugshotmonday every Monday, and I always search the hashtag before I post. Last Monday was the first time that last week’s mugshot tweet did not show up.
I understand why Twitter is throttling the index. But only 6 days of data? That’s not very useful, especially when I’m searching for more important things than my own mugshot.