UPDATED 23:17 EST / MAY 19 2015

NEWS

Google, Twitter ink deal to see tweets feature prominently in Google search results

Twitter Inc. and Google Inc. have come to a new agreement that will see live tweets featured prominently in Google’s search results for the first time since their previous partnership ended in 2011.

Under the deal announced on the Official Twitter blog, as of now users in the United States searching Google in English will see relevant Tweets in their search results within both Google’s Android and iOS apps, as well as with mobile web search.

The desktop web version is said to be “coming shortly” and the feature will eventually be rolled out to other countries, although a specific timeframe wasn’t given, other than to say it would occur in the “coming months.”

The newly announced deal builds on an earlier agreement between the two companies back in February this year which saw real time data from Twitter (the “firehose” of tweets) being made available for Google to index, although that deal didn’t feature tweets nearly as prominently as the new announcement today.

Ardan Arac, Senior Product Manager at Google, explained how it would work:

So now when you’re searching on the Google app or any browser on your phone or tablet, you can find real-time content from Twitter right in the search results.

Whether you’re interested in the latest from Taylor Swift, news about the #MadMenFinale, or updates on the NBA playoffs, you’ll have access to it directly from Google.

The Wall Street Journal reported separately that the results delivered can be a bit hit and miss depending on who or what was being searched for, noting that while a Taylor Swift search brings up tweets from Ms. Swift, a search for activist investor Carl Icahn, however, delivered tweets from others talking about him, versus actual tweets from him.

“We’re testing what resonates most with our users and we’ll keep refining it going forward,” a Google spokesman told the paper in terms of the inconsistent results, before adding that what appears “depends on a variety of complex factors and is affected by real-time changes, so it may not always appear the same way for a given query.”

The deal is a win for Twitter and will not only expose Tweets to a wider audience, but will also drive traffic back to Twitter itself.

For Google, the proof of this being a positive may be some months off; on one hand it goes towards it better indexing, and, therefore, better-providing search results, but likewise looking at the picture examples it looks like it may instead deliver a whole pile of visual noise, diminishing the user experience.


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