Google And Twitter Partner On Search Again 02-09

Google And Twitter Partner On Search Again

Google and Twitter have finally reached a new deal that will see Google indexing tweets in real time, according to a report from Bloomberg (and apparently confirmed by Re/code). The deal hasn’t been formally announced, and the terms are unknown.

The report says tweets will become visible in Google’s search results as soon as they’re posted starting in the first half of this year. It’s unclear if Google will restore the realtime search feature it used to have when it had access to those tweets in the past. In those days, there was a section at the top of some search results pages reserved for tweets and realtime updates from Twitter (though Twitter provided the bulk of them, and were often the most useful).

When the two companies failed to renew their deal four years ago, Google ended up dropping its realtime search feature altogether. There was little point to it without Twitter. It also made put a kink in Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible. The Twitterverse spews out a great deal of information every second, and it’s been a lot more accessible on Twitter itself than on Google.

In fact, Twitter has taken steps to improve its own search features in the time since the two companies grew apart. As recently as November, Twitter announced that it indexed every public tweet since 2006, making its search engine much more comprehensive in terms of the content it can retrieve.

“This new infrastructure enables many use cases, providing comprehensive results for entire TV and sports seasons, conferences (#TEDGlobal), industry discussions (#MobilePayments), places, businesses and long-lived hashtag conversations across topics, such as #JapanEarthquake, #Election2012, #ScotlandDecides, #HongKong, #Ferguson and many more,” Twitter’s Yi Zhuangsaid in a blog post.

Even before that, Twitter said at an analyst event that it wanted to do more to generate more search traffic. The company revealed that earlier in the year it had made a change allowing Google and other search engines to crawl its top 50,000 hashtagged search pages.

As far as Google is concerned, Twitter content is largely best as it happens, and that’s what this deal will enable. If you want to know what’s being said by people about something that’s happening right now, you’ll presumably be able to get a good sense of that right from Google rather than having to open up Twitter.

It will be quite interesting to see how this works with mobile, as mobile search (Google in particular) has come a long way over the past four years.

Neither company appears to be commenting on the news at this point.

Twitter’s user growth often comes into question, and investors have grown impatient. This can only help the company in that department.

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Facebook just took a huge shot at Google 12-12

Facebook just took a huge shot at Google

Facebook’s new search feature is a thinly-veiled shot at Google.

Facebook is making a change this week that, if it works, may finally sound the death knell for Google Plus, the search giant’s rival social network.

One of Facebook’s biggest weaknesses is that its internal search isn’t very robust. If you suddenly remembered your best friend posted about a cool new band on your wall a couple months ago and you wanted to go back and find that post, good luck. It’s the exact opposite experience you might have on Google services like Gmail, which turns your inbox into a vast trove of easily-searchable info.

And that was one of the most promising things about Google Plus, when it launched three years ago: The idea that Google  might turn all your online social interactions into an easy-to-search repository. From a user’s perspective, that would be handy because the stuff your friends share directly with you is often more relevant to you than what you can dig up in a general web search.

But Google Plus was even more crucial from Google’s perspective. With more of the content that’s most relevant to us appearing on our social networks rather than the broader web, it makes sense that we might think to search on social media before we search the wider Internet. If Google didn’t have an answer for that potential trend, it could result—in the very long run—in fewer people using its biggest moneymaker, search.

Search remains a vastly profitable business for Google. Revenue from Google-owned websites made up 69% of the company’s total $16.52 billion in revenue for the third quarter of this year. Google doesn’t break out exactly how much of that is from the ads it sells against your search results, but several estimates are in the 50% and up range. And its Android platform for cell phones has helped it lock down mobile search, an area as hot as social.

Still, Google’s search business is starting to slow. And that’s where Facebook  comes in. The social network announced an improved internal search feature this week that the company promises will make it easier to find stuff our friends shared with us in the past. The search upgrade is specifically designed to work well on mobile, an area where Facebook is already considered king in terms of driving traffic.

If Facebook’s new search function works well, more of its users might be inclined to search there rather than heading to Google, especially on their phones. And that would give Facebook an opening to take a run at Google’s dominance in search.

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