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"Twitter is rolling out a new search experience, its most ostentatious addition being photo and video results. Perhaps more notable, however, is that the product is a ground-up rewrite of the entire search infrastructure.\nTwitter's search engineering team describes the evolution of the search product and also shares some staggering Twitter search figures in a blog post on the release.\nTwitter search is serving an average of 1.6 billion queries per day as of April of this year. That figure represents 18,000 queries per second and marks substantial growth in users' search activity since Twitter's acquisition of the search tool Summize in 2008. Back then, it was processing an average of just 200 queries per second.\nTo scale to meet this demand, Twitter has made big changes. The rewrite, first started in spring 2010, involved a new realtime search engine and, most recently, a switch to a Java server called Blender for three times faster search.\nEarly in the process, search engineers used Twitter's first internal hackathon to build a prototype of image and video search. The project was so well-received by the company it went into production.\nBut in revamping the search experience with image and video search, Twitter also felt the need to not just return results matching keyword queries but to show search results with relevance to the searcher, essentially personalizing the search experience.\n\"Often, users are interested in only the most memorable Tweets or those that other users engage with,\" the company writes. \"In our new search experience, we show search results that are most relevant to a particular user. So search results are personalized, and we filter out the Tweets that do not resonate with other users.\"\nTo do so, Twitter's search index now incorporates static information on tweets such as language and text, dynamic information such as users' interactions with tweets, and information about the searcher. \"Our ranking function accesses the social graph and uses knowledge about the relationship between the searcher and the author of a Tweet during ranking,\" the company explains.\nTwitter, which also now removes duplicates in search, promises to extend the personal relevance search features to mobile. \"In the coming months, we will improve quality, scale our infrastructure, expand our indexes, and bring relevance to mobile.\"\nTwitter now sees upwards of 2,200 tweets per second."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2011/06/01/twitter-search-queries/>