Where can I find Twitter messages archive or search old tweets?

Question

Previously Google launched an application that can search Twitter message OVER Time like in news timeline. But it seems it now can only provide real time (current) message index, not the old and all tweets in history. I want to do research on tweets, but do not know where to download or access to such data based on timeline or geography or demographic or topic list.

Answer 1

The old tweets are not publicly accessible - even to the people who wrote them.

Perhaps you should contact Twitter. The US Library of Congress apparently is archiving this data too. You might be able to get access from either of these if it's a legitimate (university based) research activity.

Addition: There have been a few corpora made from Twitter, but they were removed from distribution at Twitter's request. The streaming API makes it pretty easy to build your own corpus in a few hours/days of a pretty decent size, but I don't know of any that are available for distribution. Depending on your application, the International Conference on Social Media and Weblogs has (terabytes of) data available for research, but I don't know if anything from twitter is included.