If you love using Twitter, you might be surprised to hear this: Your messages could be indexed by the search engines.

If you want to find out whether any of your messages are in Google’s index or Yahoo’s index, type the following in the query box:

[username] site:twitter.com

The URL’s of individual messages will be in the form:

twitter.com/[username]/statuses/XXXXXXXX

where [XXXXXXXX] is the numerical ID of the message.

To those who know that there is essentially no privacy on the web, this is not a big deal. However, for some others, this could come as a shock. Many people view Twitter as more of an IM environment, and they don’t expect to have their IM’s indexed by search engines. Unfortunately for them, it appears that anything you type in Twitter can be found by anyone. So, if you are very sensitive about your privacy, you might want to think twice before sending our your Twitter messages to make sure the content is not something you might regret later.

What about competitors? Well, messages sent on Jaiku can be indexed by the search engines as well.