In a renewal of the 2011 terminated between Twitter and Google, Bloomberg now reports that the microblogging site has struck a fresh deal with Google, wherein Google Search results will start including real-time tweets through Twitter’s ‘firehose’ data collection platform.
This deal, which was already in function since 2009, was however not renewed in 2011. This led to Google getting back to its traditional ways of indexing websites, i.e. Crawling. However crawling in Twitter’s case wasn;t very helpful as we hardly got to see tweets related to a search result on Google’s first page.
As per the latest deal, in the first half of this year, tweets will start to be visible in Google’s search results as soon as they’re posted. This will be possible through Twitter’s ‘firehose‘ user data platform, which Google get access to. Twitter already has a similar deal in place with Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing.
As for Twitter, this presents an opportunity to draw in more attention to its service as user growth has started to slow down. In a series of related deals, Twitter this week announced deals to show advertising in Flipboard Inc.’s mobile application and with Yahoo Japan Corp.
The current deal would help Twitter draw in even the non-registered users to its site, thus helping boost its advertising programs. Appearance in Google’s search results would help the company gain more visibility, possibly leading to an increased user growth rate.
Bloomberg report further states that sources close to the deal say, that engineers from both Twitter and Google have already started working on integrating their platforms and we’ll start seeing the results by first half of this year.
Though this new deal does not involve any advertising revenue, it will still get Twitter a good amount in data licensing revenue, which will it brought up $16 Million to $41 Million last year. With Google on-board, this revenue is sure to shoot up.
However, this deal may sound alarm bells in the Google Plus camp. Why ? Well, Google Plus is currently the only social network, results from which appear directly on Google’s Search page, as soon as you search for a personality or a company. With Twitter on-board, viewers are more likely to be drawn towards the more popular microblogging site than Google’s in-house social network.
IMAGE : BLOOMBERG
