In case you haven't noticed today, Twitter was down for a couple of hours. 
The TwitterTroll stats page provides an overview of the number of Twitter messages indexed by hour for the current day. There is a big gap between 1:00 and 6:00. I bet this gap is due to the outage of Twitter.com.
Some people would like to know the answer to questions such as "how many users are there in the Twitter community", "how many Twitter messages have been published since the start", "how many Twitter messages are published every day" … Unfortunately, I have not yet found a source with correct and reliable answers to all these questions.
Two weeks ago I discovered the stats page of Twittertroll. Twittertroll describes itself as "the coolest real-time Twitter search engine!". This week I had a look again at their stats page and I was surprized to see the evolution of the number of Twitter messages (tweets) indexed by Twittertroll by day. This number was going doing, pretty hard. 
As the Twittertroll stats page only shows the number of tweets for the last seven days, I looked for sources to find number of tweets for the prevous days. Luckely I was able to find a previous version of the Twittertroll stats page in the Google cache and also a printscreen in a message on the Twittown blog. The graph below shows the number of Twitter messages indexed by Twittertroll by day since June 9, 2007.
My question was wether the TwitterTroll data reflected the actual situation. Was there indeed a sharp decline in number of Twitter messages ? Was Twitter really in trouble ?
There is another source of information regarding number of Twitter messages published in the Twitter public timeline. Twitterment, the search engine from eBiquity, not only shows on its stats page graphs of the total number of tweets indexed by Twitterment, but it also publishes the total number of indexed tweets. Comparing the number of indexed tweets for different dates allows to get an idea about the number of tweets per day. I found again several sources where a copy of the Twitterment stats page was kept :
Twittown post - April 13, 2007 - 368103
Google cache - June 4, 2007 - 1633713
Twitterfacts post - June 8, 2007 - 1751613
Live.com cache - June 18, 2007 - 1988173
Own observation - June 19, 2007 around 12:00 PM (CET) - 2014643
Own observation - June 20, 2007 around 12:00 PM (CET) - 2042493
Making the difference of the number of indexed tweets and dividing this difference by the number of days between the two dates gives the average number of tweets per day, as shown in the graph below.
Conclusion : the number of tweets per day is not in sharp decline as may be suggested by the Twittertroll stats page. It is clear from the graphs above that Twittertroll is only indexing about one third of the tweets indexed by Twitterment (8500 compared to 25000). As there is no other source to verify, it is impossible to tell if the number of tweets indexed by Twitterment is the correct number of tweets in the Twitter public timeline. Perhaps the people from Twitter.inc can show some light on global statistics.
I just noticed an announcement of Twittertroll, another Twitter search engine. As I have seen similar announcements, I found it worthwhile to have a closer look at several sites offering specific search functions for the Twitosphere. 
Name : Twittersearch
URL : twittermap.com/search
Author : twitter.com/davetroy
Announcement : here
Launched : March 15, 2007
Description : Twitter zeitgeist will be searched and displayed.
Number of messages indexed : only a moving window of a limited number of days
Results of query "paris hilton" : 210 messages
Name : Twitterment, What are we twittering?
URL : twitterment.umbc.edu
Author : ebiquity.umbc.edu
Announcement : here
Launched : April 11, 2007
Description : Twitterment provides a search interface over an index of recent updates obtained periodically from the public timeline API.
Number of messages indexed : over 1,7 million posts, since April 2007
Results of query "paris hilton" : 407 messages
Name : Twitter.FM, Search what world's people are doing!
URL : twitter.fm
Author : twitter.com/ohkura
Announcement : here
Launched : April 29, 2007
Description : Simple but multilingual full text search engine for Twitter, supports CJK, Arabic, etc. Country specified search is also provided.
Number of messages indexed : ?
Results of query "paris hilton" : 20 messages
Name : TwitterTroll.com, the only real-time Twitter search engine!
URL : twittertroll.com
Author : twitter.com/williamsba
Announcement : here
Launched : June 4, 2007
Description : TwitterTroll.com indexes tweets from the public timeline. We index a large majority of tweets, but can not guarantee all tweets will be indexed.
Number of messages indexed : already over 75,000, since June 4, 2007
Results of query "paris hilton" : 83 messages
I discovered that several sites mentioned in an previous post on this blog (Monitoring the buzz in the Twitosphere) have stopped working. I have added information below for two sites that used to offer search. Perhaps they will back in a short while.
Name : Twitterverse, What is Twitter Doing Today
URL : www.twitterverse.com
Author : twitter.com/tw1tterverse
Announcement : here
Launched : April 9, 2007
Description : Twitterverse displays popular words based on time and popularity.
Number of messages indexed : down since May 11, 2007
Results of query "paris hilton" : no results
Name : Twitterbuzz, what are people linking to from Twitter
URL : twitterbuzz.com
Author : twitter.com/rsynnott
Announcement : here
Launched : March 19, 2007
Description : TwitterBuzz collects links that are mentioned on Twitter and arranges them in order of popularity. You can view links mentioned in the last hour, day, week, or forever (since archival started).
Number of messages indexed : no results shown
Results of query "paris hilton" : no results
The table below shows the traffic rankings for Twitter.com and the Twitter search engines mentioned above. Web traffic to the Twitter search engines seems to be limited.
If you cannot find the Twitter messages what you are looking for using one or more of the above mentioned Twitter search engines, you can always use one of the major search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, Live.com, ... as they have also indexed Twitter.com :
Google.com : 693,000 pages
Yahoo.com : 229,000 pages
Live.com : 140,000 pages
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