Twitter signs deals with Microsoft and Google

Twitter has signed deals with Microsoft and Google to include its updates on their search results.

Paul Yiu, Microsoft’s head of search, said yesterday on a Microsoft blog: “We now have access to the entire public Twitter feed and have a beta of Bing Twitter search for you to play with (in the US, for now). Try it out. The Bing and Twitter teams want to know what you think.”

Although the Microsoft deal was announced first, it soon became clear that it was not exclusive, with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone blogging: “Twitter is providing Bing access to the overwhelming deluge of public, real-time tweets rushing in from all around the world so they can help you find those that make the most sense right now.

“While Twitter currently presents tweets based simply on timeliness, Bing is experimenting with new solutions such as ‘best match’. We hope more working relationships with organisations in the search business will mean even more variety for users.”

And last night, Google revealed that it too had signed a deal with the microblogging site.  Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience, said on the company’s official blog: “In the past few years, an entirely new type of data has emerged – real-time updates like those on Twitter have appeared not only as a way for people to communicate their thoughts and feelings, but also as an interesting source of data about what is happening right now in regard to a particular topic.

“Given this new type of information and its value to search, we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months.”