Twitter announced Tuesday it's compiled a searchable list of every tweet ever published since it went online in 2006.

Users can now search for every public tweet, according to Yi Zhuang, an engineer and co-leader of the Twitter project.

The microblogging site activated the "Tweet Index" that's available on Android and iOS apps, as well as on Twitter's standard Web client.

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Zhuang pointed out that while Twitter had excelled at surfacing breaking news and events in real time, the long-standing goal had always been to let people search through every tweet ever published. It's the first time users will be able to search the entire Twitter site for results.

By Twitter's own estimation, around "half a trillion documents" have been generated by Twitter users since 2006. The company said its priority is to provide users with an efficient way to search through volumes of tweets.

The team behind "Tweet Index" encountered a lot of challenges such as developing a modular system that able to scale over time and that can deliver a quick, simple and cost-effective way to allow users to search for tweets.

Twitter said it takes only 100 milliseconds for Tweet Index to deliver results.

Recent tweets are placed in RAM to allow fast updates and low latency. On the other hand, older indexed tweets are placed in less expensive areas to prevent maintenance costs from spiraling out of control.

Tags Tweet Index, public tweets, searchable tweets, microblogging site