SAN FRANCISCO: Twitter's entire content, going back to the very first tweet in March 2006, is to be placed on a searchable social data index produced by Topsy.

The San Francisco-based social analytics platform said that with more than 425bn tweets, videos, images and blog posts, it could now provide more retrievable social data than any other internet search engine, including Bing and Google.

Vipul Ved Prakash told the New York Times that the way to make sense out of more than 400bn pieces of content was to rank them by looking at how much a particular piece of content is being cited by other people.

The development means that the Twitter stream will be open to real-time indexing, search and analysis and the company said the service will be available to its subscribers at no extra cost.

Recognising that most of Topsy's users are businesses that need to mine social data, Prakash said: "What we are doing is creating new products from the data. It becomes very complementary to the products that Twitter is providing."

"By adding a full historical index, now we can look even further back to the very first tweets seven years ago, meaning our users have access to the best, most accurate view of the world's social conversation," he added.

The company's algorithm will assess the most relevant results in a search and also factor in re-tweets and the past influence of the tweeter. The results can include a time frame, graphics or come as a result of a search in ten languages.

Data sourced from New York Times, CNET; additional content by Warc staff