Google offers Twitter archive

All your tweets are belong to Google

Google is enabling users to plumb the depths of every Twitter user's historical feeds with a new search tab.

Google Updates, available here ahead of its official launch, lets users search tweets by date and time, accompanied by graphs showing how popular memes trend over time.

Results are presented as a timeline, so you can see how twits all over the world react to breaking news, without the hassle of listening to talk radio.

The company has included real-time results on its regular web search page for some months, after buying Twitter's unexpurgated feed last December, but the archive has not been fully searchable.

“Tweets and other short-form updates create a history of commentary that can provide valuable insights into what’s happened and how people have reacted,” blogged product manager Dylan Casey.

Meanwhile, the US Library of Congress appears to agree, today announcing that it has bought a copy of Twitter's entire archive – four years of tweets.