Google/Twitter partnership seems closer than ever

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Twitter's profile is continuing to skyrocket as more and more individuals and businesses take advantage of its attractive micro-blogging platform (including ourselves, find bigmouthmedia on Twitter). Consequently, search experts are probing the effect its real-time search function will have on Google's dominance. And, following the recent integration of Twitter Search with user profiles and the unveiling of some would say superior Twitter search service Twazzup, it's perhaps only a matter of time until the two connect their operations in some way.

Earlier this month, more Google-Twitter acquisition rumours surfaced when Marissa Mayer said that Google was interesting in offering "micro-blogging or micro-messaging" in its search services. But it's yesterday's admission from Google CEO Eric Schmidt that Google would work to index Twitter updates without outright buying the company that is perhaps the closest that the search engine has come to saying that an agreement could be forged between the two.
Speaking at the Google Zeitgeist conference, he said: "We can talk to them ... there is all sorts of stuff we can do. We do not have to buy everybody to work with them, the whole principle of the web is people can talk to each other."

Interestingly, Google co-founder Larry Page also admitted that that his brainchild had been losing out to Twitter over the last 12 months. In a closing address at Google Zeitgeist, he said: "People really want to do stuff real time and I think they [Twitter] have done a great job about it. I think we have done a relatively poor job of creating things that work on a per-second basis."

The statements from Schmidt and Page come just a week after Google's Searchology 2009 event, a platform that many pundits felt the search engine would use to announce a real time search alternative to Twitter. However, the unveiling of its new Search Options feature - which allows users to filter search results by the time in which they were indexed, among other things - was seen by many experts not to have gone far enough to counter Twitter's unique real time search facility.

Google's assertion that it does not have to buy Twitter to work with it is sure to please many die-hard Twitter fans - particularly after Google's Friday outage, which has many worried about Google's ability to cope with downtime.
What's more, anyone that has been with Twitter since its early days in 2006 will no doubt remember the fallout from Google's 2007 purchase of micro-blogging site Jaiku. The website, seen as a real rival to Twitter at the time, was effectively neglected by the search engine for over a year after the purchase before eventually handing over its development to volunteers in January 2009, and leaving many Jaiku users defecting to Twitter in the intervening period.

However, on Google's side, indexing Twitter updates will always run the risk of returning irrelevant results, though that is something the search engine has acknowledged. But any partnership between the two that can help Google return faster and more relevant results without sacrificing Twitter's independence to the Mountain View empire has to be of benefit to global internet users.

by Search Copywriter
Y. Sulaiman