In early October 2010, Twitter introduced their New Search
Architecture, claiming it was an improvement to their already
impressive search feature. They talked about having developed “a
new, modern search architecture that is based on a highly
efficient inverted index instead of a rational database.” This
improvement came at an opportune time since Twitter was pushing
the limits of their server with over 1,000 tweets and 12,000
queries per second. Enter ‘Modified Lucene‘. In tech speak, the
new search architecture offered significantly improved garbage
collection performance, lock-free data structures and
algorithms, posting lists that are traversable in reverse order,
and efficient early query termination. But what does all of that
really mean? Twitter’s success as a search engine over Google
was predicted as early as 2009 in a blog post on LewMoorman.com
proposing that Human Powered Search would build better results
than index based search engines. Another article writing in July
2010 notes that Twitter is