New technology is helping Twitter answer more queries.

New search technology is allowing Twitter to answer one billion queries per day, the social media site has announced on its engineering blog.

People searching the microblogging site for information on parcel delivery news should not have even noticed the change, Twitter said.

Based on a highly efficient inverted index instead of a relational database, the new Lucene search engine technology uses Java script.

Twitter has tweaked the engine to make it more tailored for the site, which is handling 1,000 tweets per second and 12,000 queries per second, equating to one billion queries a day.

"Lucene is great, but in its current form it has several shortcomings for real-time search. That's why we rewrote big parts of the core in-memory data structures," the blog post explained.

The social media site even believes that its new indexer can handle up to 50 times more tweets per second.

Global Web Index managing director Tom Smith recently claimed that Twitter and microblogging is still "relatively niche", appealing to a certain audience.

Posted by Tom Sands 

Article Added: 07/10/2010 16:33:56