Search Goes Full Throttle

After much speculation, Twitter has announced partnerships with both Bing and Google and has given them both full access to its full feed of public tweets. This is huge for search as it will literally open the floodgates for real-time, recent search items that Bing and Google desperately need. It’s like tweets are gold.

Let me explain: Twitter is notorious for breaking news. Why? Because millions of people are on Twitter tweeting about their lives and live events – thus making it the “CNN” of the internet for news and breaking events. Google and Bing don’t have access to the live “pulse” and therefore have to wait for blogs, websites and other avenues to post their stories and then that takes hours for Google and Bing (or any other search engine) to index them and show up in a search result.

Techcrunch explains it best: “Tweets and other realtime data streams are valuable to Google and Bing because for many types of searches (news, events, sports, stocks, shopping, etc.), the most recent information is often the most relevant. And it’s hard to beat millions of people Tweetng out their thoughts—the “pulse of the planet,” if you will—for realtime information about every subject imaginable. Google and Bing need access to this stream of data if they want to keep their results fresh and relevant.”

This isn’t only good for Google and Bing. Obviously, Twitter got paid an undisclosed amount of money (I’m willing to bet a TON of it) for this rich, delicious live feed of tweets. But this is also good for us, bloggers, too. Why? Techcrunch, again, has the best example: “if a link to a post about healthcare reform on an obscure blog suddenly gains currency and is retweeted hundreds of times, that is a signal to perhaps rank that link higher in searches about ‘healthcare reform.’ Google and Bing can use the firehose as a rich source of signals to mine and then blend back into regular search results.”

Time will tell and show if Twitter has the ability to transform search into something that is truly magical and useful, for once.