Big news from Google search.
Twitter results (Tweets) will be included in their search results in future. This follows in the wake of Bing making a similar annoumcement
10/21/2009 02:09:00 PM
At Google, our goal is to create the most comprehensive, relevant and fast search in the world. In the past few years, an entirely new type of data has emerged — real-time updates like those on Twitter have appeared not only as a way for people to communicate their thoughts and feelings, but also as an interesting source of data about what is happening right now in regard to a particular topic.
Given this new type of information and its value to search, we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.
Posted by Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products and User Experience
Taken from : http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/rt-google-tweets-and-updates-and-search.html
I guess that will mean another rush from marketers to get Tweets into index results.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Does this mean than just popular Tweet subjects will be indexed or every single Tweet? (Which would be a massive task!)
I guess that it hard to know at this point
Everyone is guessing that Google (and Bing) will be after the breaking news type stuff that can evolve quickly through Twitter.
My own biggest question is how the individual tweet(er)s earn authority with Google such that Google knows which tweets speak the truth. We just saw Twitter meltdown on reports (false) that Kanye West had died.
So … taking that forward how does Google merge those results in realtime?
BUT … to my original point. The constant guessing meantime will mean that Marketers will tweet all the more as they will perceive that to be a way to get double exposure from a single post. Who know at this time whether that is the way that it will actually work.
There’ll probably be some weighting towards the ‘importance’ of the tweeter with the number of followers being the feature equivalant of inbound links.
In such a way tweeters like lance armstrong, arnie, barack obama & stephen fry will have more weighting than mere mortals.
Possibly only a certain weighting will allow indexing