Real time tweets to appear in Google search results
05 Feb 2015
It might be just a matter of time before tweets returned to Google search results, CNET reported.
Twitter had struck a deal with Google to display tweets in the search giant's query results as soon as the brief missives appeared on the social networking site, Bloomberg reported.
Google could display tweets in search results before, but they were not in real-time and the search giant had to crawl Twitter for the information.
The deal which would take effect later this year, would revive a non-exclusive agreement Google had with Twitter a few years ago for access to Twitter's firehose, the stream of content generated by the microblogging service's 284 million users.
The new agreement underscored Twitter's push to increase user engagement with the product - something investors hoped would translate into increased advertising revenue.
Like Yahoo and Microsoft's Bing, Google entered into a pact with Twitter for access to the social network's full live stream of user tweets.
The deal however, expired in 2011 when the two companies failed to strike an agreement to extend the licensing agreement. Following the expiry of the deal, Twitter cut off the feed.
The change would become evident to users some time in the first half of this year.
User tweets would appear more prominently on Google searches in coming months thanks to the deal signed between the search engine and Twitter, time.com reported.
The deal reportedly does not include advertising revenue, however, according to Bloomberg, Twitter would receive data-licensing revenue.
Engineers from both companies had reportedly started already designing the new search arrangement.
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has been looking to boost his company's users to take on popular social-media sites like Facebook, which counts 1.4 billion users, and Instagram, has 300 million users and was also owned by Facebook.
The company's growth rate had clearly failed to impress disappointed investors and stock had dipped from nearly $66 per share at this time last year to just over $40 today.
News of the deal came as the Verge reported that Costolo saw internent trolling as adversely impacting the company's growth potential.
He added it was no secret and the rest of world talked about [trolling] every day.
He said the company lost core users by not addressing simple trolling issues that they faced every day.
Twitter is scheduled to report fourth-quarter earnings later in the day today.
