could not agree more...why I have never actually used their search. - Braden Douglass

Twitter needs to technically fix the search instead of decorating it. - ashish from iPhone

Maybe they could acquire a third party search service... - Ken Sheppardson

Maybe they could just start taking this shit seriously? - Andy Bakun

my tweets have disappeared off the public search timeline since the DoS attacks. Twitter's a free service and customer service reflects it... - Sherrie Rose

Twitter has been a joke for two years. Problem is too many people enjoy using it. It's a shame people didn't move away from twitter. Pity for those people. - Richard A.

Totally agreed. I had a personal hash-tag for so many tweets just so that I could maintain some records.All are gone now :( - Sujay

Despite all the problems I do like that I can narrow my search geographically. That is something I wish I could do with FriendFeed. I would also like to search for new friends geographically. - Skyler Call

Question: Why would anybody need to search twitter back more than a couple of weeks? I don't see how Tweets hold any value for that long. Do you save all your SMS Text messages too? - Otto

Otto wins! If it's something worth saving, blog it, or put it somewhere that's yours, not Twitter's, or Tumblr's or anyone else's. Oye... - Mike Lewis

Why are you sorry that a product you're not responsible for is a joke? - Trent Hamm

If Twitter does come up with a good search functionality, then I want the ability to purge my tweets after some period of time. I don't want my messages being permanent records. - Otto

What Twitter did to their search earlier in the Spring was a huge surprise to me as I used it regularly. The changes they made did not raise much of a huff then, so my read was that few people understand and make use of these search capabilities. While the friendfeed search has room for growth which we may not see now with the buyout, it is clearly one of the main reasons I decided to make this my social media home. - Richard Reeve

Once in a while I think to myself how much data does the Internet want to keep, and why does it matter. Wouldn't it be better if there was a national library online that wasn't putting a load on the Internet from keeping so much useless data (which Twitter mostly has, BTW...) - David Libby

My sense is that the dross is an inevitable by product, and what one might consider dross might be valuable to another for very different reasons, some of which we might not even recognize yet. Regardless of the system, I'm for archiving the entire unfolding transcript... - Richard Reeve

Is FF search really much better? Trying to find things older than a few days or weeks is damn near impossible. - Brian Sullivan

Brian, while FF only returns about 630 or items back, once you apply searches by keyword, that is more than enough to get you back all the way to the beginning of your Twitter, etc. record kept within FF. And that is the value, Otto, that before you could use Twitter as a very handy, "self-tagging" (by way of your tweet context) bookmark repository, etc. Sometimes you do want to find out what (specific) people said during a given conference, during a major event, sentiment trends over time, etc. etc. - Alex Schleber

@Otto42, agreed that you should be able to opt out for privacy reasons, then again, you already sort of can by protecting your updates (granted that won't get your old tweets out of Twitter Search & FF, etc. databases). - Alex Schleber