Twitter posts haven’t been seen on Google’s search results page for a while now. Back in 2011, the search engine withdrew the feature where Tweets showed up on results pages due to an agreement between Google and Twitter expiring. During the first half of 2015 Tweets will make a comeback, appearing alongside links in a special real time feed.
It was the launch of Google’s own social network, Google+, that may have been partially responsible for the original real time feature and social media results to be suspended. Google’s very own attempt to breach the social market has since then only been met with lukewarm responses and adoption, as users have stuck to Facebook and other services.
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Now that Google+ seems to either be a dud or a sleeper hit potentially growing in the future, Google are once again ready to bring Tweets back to their service. Microsoft and Yahoo search engines both remained in partnership with Twitter, and show tweets up in their results, so Google’s re-integration of the feature will mean they offer a service that previously gave competitors an edge.
Recently in late 2014 Twitter did release their own search tool, meaning that users have the option of trawling through their tweets on the main Twitter site. Now that Google is set to be back in partnership that tool may become obsolete, although it most likely won’t be removed and may even become integrated with Google’s software.
Additionally back in 2014 Twitter begun allowing search engines to obtain results from their site, meaning that search engines could index and show up the top 50,000 hashtag results. Whilst the big trending topics of the day have appeared since, it still doesn’t mean that individual tweets ware back.
Now that the Twitter ‘firehose’ as it’s called is returning to Google, it’ll mean that once again a unique Twitter feed should one day appear, bringing live updates through the social network. If the real time search feature of 2011 returns it’ll mean that Twitter results will appear alongside content from Google news and blog search results on a topic in a live feed.
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Your personal Tweets are somewhat safe, as with the 2011 feature only results from Twitter that were deemed ‘highly relevant’ to the search term were included. Parameters were set on the original service to filter spammy Tweets and other irrelevent content, so hopefully privacy concerns may be alleviated.
We’ll keep you updated on when the live feed feature with Twitter reults returns to Google, hopefully a release date and more information will arrive soon.
Via: Engadget
Source: Bloomberg