Android and iOS smartphone and tablet owners who use Google Search on their devices will get real-time Twitter content served up with their search results.
Initially, the feature is available only on Google.com in English in the Google app for Android and iOS, Google senior manager Ardan Arac wrote in a company blog post.
The company is working on delivering the same feature in other languages and with desktop searches as well, Arac said, although she did not say how soon that might happen.
“Whether you’re interested in the latest from Taylor Swift, news about the #MadMenFinale, or updates on the NBA playoffs, you’ll have access to it directly from Google,” Arac wrote. “Let’s use NASA as an example—just ask the Google app about ‘NASA Twitter,’ and in the search results, you’ll see Tweets from @NASA.”
The news that Google is bringing Twitter content to mobile devices via Google Search, which Google announced May 19, comes three months after the company said it had entered into a partnership with Twitter to deliver live tweets in search results.
Neither Google nor Twitter have released any details of their partnership beyond confirming that there is one. However, engineers from the two companies have been working on integrating Twitter’s real-time updates into Google search results for several months. In return for making its tweets available to Google, Twitter will receive licensing revenue from the company.
For Google, this marks the second time that the company has attempted to add a real-time element to its search results via Twitter and other sources.
In 2009, Twitter’s feed was a core part of a Google real-time search feature that also included content from several others, including FriendFeed, Jaiku and identi.ca. At the time, Google described the content integration as a way to add life to search engine results and to give users access to the freshest content on a topic as possible.
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who was then Google’s vice president of search products and user experience, had noted that the company’s partnership with Twitter provided an “interesting source of data about what is happening right now in regard to a particular topic.”
When the partnership with Twitter expired in 2011, Google too pulled the plug on the real-time feature in Google Search but said that it would relaunch it sometime in the future.
The May 19 announcement suggests that the company is once again ready to make live content available with its search contents.
Analysts, generally giving a thumbs-up to the partnership, note that it gives Google access to more user-generated content while significantly broadening Twitter’s reach.
Twitter, for its part, said it has begun allowing Google and other search engines to crawl through its top hashtags for relevant content.