Topsy indexes entire tweet history for search, analysis

Topsy is backfilling its social search engine to include every public tweet ever published on Twitter, the company will announce Wednesday. The inventory addition means the company's analytics tools can now go all the way back in time to Twitter's first tweet, penned by co-founder Jack Dorsey on March 21, 2006.

Founded in 2007, Topsy, an index of the social Web, started out as a social search company that has since become adept at sentiment analysis and has outlasted a number of now defunct social search startups. Along the way, Topsy has become besties with Twitter, powering the information network's indices for the 2012 presidential race and the 2013 Oscars.

The release positions the company as a top destination for deep dives into social data. To drive home the point, Topsy said it now houses more than 425 billion tweets, videos, images, and blog posts, which adds up to more social data than Bing or Google.

"By adding a full historical index, now we can look even further back to the very first tweets 7 years ago, meaning our users have access to the best, most accurate view of the world's social conversation," Topsy co-founder and CTO Vipul Ved Prakash said in a statement.

The company said its expanded collection of tweets will be available to its paying customers at no additional fee. The tweet infusion also comes at no extra cost to Topsy, Jamie de Geurre, senior vice president of product and marketing, told CNET, meaning that the startup is getting more bang for its buck.

Like Gnip, Topsy is one of four partners certified as a Twitter data reseller. Topsy is the only Twitter partner certified as both a data reseller and an analytics provider, Geurre said.