With Google and Twitter unable to meet in the middle, Google Realtime Search is coming back with Google+ data. The move should boost exposure for Google+.
Google's (NASDAQ:GOOG) Realtime Search product is returning for an encore
with Google+ updates, according to the company's lead search engine engineer.
Google experimented with real-time search for
more than a year after striking deals to integrate tweets from Twitter and
status updates from Facebook and MySpace, as well as several other sources.
The search
giant gave Realtime Search a new home here,
http://www.google.com/realtime,
last August, allowing users to search and scroll through tweets, as well as
links from YouTube, Quora and other Websites.
The idea was
to catch some of the real-time traffic enjoyed by Twitter when major news
events rocked the world. However, Google failed to renew its agreement with
Twitter for access tweets through the firehose API, and so the company took
Realtime Search down July 2, according to
Search Engine Land.
Google said at the time:
"Since
October of 2009, we have had an agreement with Twitter to include their updates
in our search results through a special feed, and that agreement expired on
July 2. While we will not have access to this special feed from Twitter,
information on Twitter that's publicly available to our crawlers will still be
searchable and discoverable on Google."
Google Fellow
Amit Singhal said during a Churchill Club panel Aug. 4 that Google took down
Realtime Search because it wasn't providing enough value without the Twitter
stream, according to
Mashable.
Singhal added
that his team is "actively working" on bringing the product back, and
is testing adding data from Google+ and other sources to Realtime Search.
Adding Google+
status updates-even just from the current 25 million or so + users, will certainly
bring more value to Realtime Search because it would allow people who might not
yet be part of the Google+ field trial to see what kind of conversations are
happening on the new social network. That's good exposure for the service.
It would also
continue the trend of Google integrating its software products to create a more
seamless Web service mesh. More integrated generally means faster for users to
access and switch between services, which could translate to more searches
conducted and ads served.
Some Mashable
readers urged Google to hash out an agreement with Twitter, which has as much as
millions of active users firing a billion tweets a day:
"Without
including Twitter, this becomes a less compelling tool, regardless of adding
Google+. Twitter's mainstream appeal means it covered any topic worth talking
about in real-time search, often helping to find out localized information as
well as international level incidents," wrote reader Alex Sarson in
comments after the Mashable piece.
"Overall
Google, get back to the table with Twitter... negotiate... or don't bother wasting
your time."
Email
Print
