Your old, embarrassing tweets just became much easier to find

Basketball player Kevin Durant's insulting tweets from 2009 can now be easily searched with Twitter's new search infrastructure. Photo / AP

Until Tuesday afternoon, when Twitter released its first complete index, digging up old tweets - even from politicians, celebrities and other notables - was a surprisingly difficult task. Twitter's infamously glitchy search function could only go back so far in time. Google only indexes a small percentage of all tweets, and is biased in favour of top-tier accounts.

So if you wanted to surface, say, those profane, insulting and otherwise unsavoury tweets that basketball's Kevin Durant sent circa 2009, you had two options: Navigate to Durant's timeline, put a weight on your keyboard's "down" arrow and hope to reach the bottom within your lifetime; or shell out thousands of dollars for an analytics service like Topsy (... which shuttered to the public a few months ago, anyway).

You couldn't jump to a particular month or year in a user's timeline, as you can on Facebook. And you certainly couldn't search a user's corpus of tweets.

In other words, even Durant's more offensive missives were pretty darn safe. Until now!

That's because Twitter just began rolling out a new search infrastructure that will allow anyone to search every tweet ever published publicly. That might not seem like a terribly profound deal, given that this information was technically out in the open already.

@russwest44 ur so gay lol

— Kevin Durant (@KDTrey5) August 28, 2009

But as anyone who has ever searched for an old tweet knows very well, "out in the open" is a relative term. A tweet from 2006 may technically be accessible, but it's buried under eight years of digital sediment - thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of later tweets, each appearing reverse-chronologically, fossilising the oldest tweets further, linking none of them to search results.

In fact, you can think of Twitter's incomplete index as a corollary to the whole right-to-be-forgotten debate: In both cases, the material in question is still online - but since it's not tied to a search index, it may as well not exist.

Twitter is rolling the index out by degrees: While the underlying infrastructure went live on Tuesday, a post on the platform's official blog says they'll continue tweaking how search results are displayed and rolling out "new product experiences," whatever that means.

In either case, you have a little time to ponder the ancient tweets you'd most like to uncover. Or to clean up your own digital footprint! You decide.