It has been announced that Topsy, the social search and analytics provider, is allowing users to search its index for every single tweet that has been published since inception of Twitter in 2006. This tool is very useful, making a possible acquisition target for Twitter.
According to Topsy, since Twitter’s creation in 2006, there are now more than 540 billion tweets in its index. Topsy has become a social analytics service in addition to being a “social search engine.”
Unlike most search sites that emerged between 2008 and 2010, Topsy has the distinction of practically being the lone survivor on Hmong a group of real time search sites. The unfortunate sites that are counted among the now dead sites include Collecta, OneRiot, Crowdeye, Tweetmeme and Scoopler. At the time, Google, Yahoo and Bing appropriated or adopted real time search, which since the killed the startups. Topsy was the exception.
WalMart Labs purchased OneRiot, leaving the others to be shut down.