TwitterTwitter has been styling itself as a realtime search engine for some time, but the potential audience for digging through all those tweets just got a whole lot bigger: both Google and Bing have just announced that they’ll begin shovelling relevant 140 character content into their search results.

On a blog post yesterday, Google’s vice-president of search products and user experience, Marissa Mayer, said that “we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data.”


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A Google search feature roping the public Twitter stream in is still some months off, she wrote, but Google isn’t the only search engine Twitter has been schmoozing: Microsoft’s Bing now also has access to all that realtime twitter witter, and if you’re in the US, you can already test out its beta Twitter search bar. Unlike Google, Bing will also begin indexing public Facebook updates too.

Facebook has already started pulling in revenue, but the Google and Bing tie-ups are big news for Twitter, as they both expand its audience and potentially provide healthy chunks of dough for the micro-blogging service.

We’ll let you know as soon as the Twitter search options start cropping up in Google – combine them with the Google Wonder Wheel, and we reckon they’re on to something special.

Out TBC | £TBC | Google and Bing

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  • http://www.findingsalesadvantage.com Craig

    Twitter must love being caught in the middle of this battle having seen traffic increases go a bit stale recently. I’m not sure this move is good for anyone though, it’s simply going to further clog search results. It may seem like a nice idea the way their describing it, but I can’t honestly see it working. There is simply just too much content!

    • http://www.electricpig.co.uk Ben Sillis

      I see your concern, although Bing’s beta Twitter search appears to have roped it off from the rest of the site which is OK I guess (I can’t test it here in the UK). I’d hope that Google’s effort would prioritise retweeted tweets as that would indicate more importance/relevance. We’ll see.

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