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UPDATE: Microsoft Bing has ruled the news roost at the Web 2.0 Summit today, launching a Bing Twitter page to index tweets and announcing a deal to rake in and present Facebook status updates on Bing.
Despite kicking the collective butts of everyone in search, Google couldn’t idly sit by and let Bing own the Web 2.0 news crush. So, in a blatant “Me, too” announcement, Google said it has reached an agreement with Twitter to include tweets in its search results.
The kicker? It will be months before we see tweets populate Google results in real time.
Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience, said in a scantily detailed blog post
Mayer later told the Web 2.0 Summit audience that Twitter content will be integrated into Google’s search results page, so that fast-rising queries like Michael Jackson, Google Wave, will be surfaced in a Google One Box. The results will be ranked according to relevance.
Users who only want will be able to real-time results will be able to select those. Mayer declined to provide financial details, but implied that some money went to Twitter for this partnership.
Twitter CEO Evan Williams added:
“We’ve always taken an open approach to how people experience Twitter, particularly in how and where tweets are read. Users have benefited greatly from the abundance of choice provided by our ecosystem partners. We’re honored to take this next step with Google and tap into their expertise to support the rapid, open exchange of information.“
First, the search engine war is getting brutal, with Google and Microsoft leveraging real-time results as the new weapons of choice.
That said, the “coming months?” Are they kidding us? Announcing a deal months before it actually comes to fruition? That means Bing is months ahead of Google in real-time search.
Google’s news, announced via a brief blog post, feels hashed together simply to keep Bing from soaking up the glory in Google’s backyard.
I think it’s great that Google is finally doing this, but why didn’t it get there first? Why would Twitter partner with Microsoft Bing, with a market share at 9 percent that is paltry compared with Google’s 65 percent?
It feels like a PR move merely to answer the flood of questions journalists have about why Google isn’t indexing Twitter tweets. At the least, it’s designed to temper the “Google is lost at sea in the real-time search” conversations.
Yet unlike Bing Twitter, Google’s deal is not only not ready to roll, but it won’t be ready for months.
It’s weird to say Google is behind the curve in something involving search … but Google is behind the curve in something involving search: the real-time conversation.
Read more about this on Techmeme here.