Twitter has teamed up with Google to make tweet updates more searchable online. This means tweets will now start being visible in Google’s search results as soon as they’re posted starting in the first half of this year.
The deal giving the Web company access to Twitter’s firehose, the stream of data generated by the microblogging service’s 284 million users, people with knowledge of the matter said Wednesday. Google previously had to crawl Twitter’s site for the information, which will now be visible automatically.
Engineers from Twitter and Google are already working on the arrangement, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deal isn’t public.
Will Stickney, a spokesman for San Francisco-based Twitter, declined to comment. Jason Freidenfelds, a spokesman for Mountain View, California-based Google, didn’t respond to a message seeking comment.
The two companies had a similar deal from 2009 to 2011. Ali Rowghani, Twitter’s former chief operating officer, had been against renewing the agreement to keep more control over Twitter’s content and it lapsed, the people said.
There’s no advertising revenue involved in the deal between Twitter and Google, one of the people said. That suggests Twitter will receive data-licensing revenue, which was $41 million in the third quarter, up from $16 million a year earlier.
Anthony Noto, Twitter’s chief financial officer, said at the company’s analyst meeting in November that it had been working to make tweets easier to find through search engines, and that negotiating with search providers could be a “unique opportunity” to distribute tweets to more people.
Source: Bloomberg
