MICROSOFT AND Google have secured separate agreements to access real-time content from web phenomenon Twitter, intensifying their battle for a search market that Google dominates.
Google and Microsoft’s five-month-old Bing each announced deals to access Twitter’s store of public data in real time this week, in the latest sign of escalating competition between the two search engines.
The long-awaited deals are expected to ramp up the efficacy and lure of search results, by allowing users to scan real-time Tweets: 140-character stream-of-consciousness messages that Twitter hosts on its popular website.
The back-to-back announcements underscored how real-time data in search results is shaping up to be a pivotal battleground in the search arena.
Microsoft unveiled its deal with Twitter and provided an onstage demonstration of the newly launched product at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco.
Hours later, Google announced on its company blog its own agreement, promising that Twitter messages, or Tweets, would be incorporated into search results “in the coming months”. Both companies would not disclose financial terms. Microsoft also announced a deal to include content from social network Facebook.
Asked about the timing of twin announcements, Google vice-president of search Marissa Mayer said deals between fast-growing companies like Google and Twitter took a long time to come together.
“This is not something that happens on the scale of hours, it’s something that happens on the scale of months,” she said. Google’s addition of Twitter data will fill a “critical gap”.
“Whenever there’s new data that’s emerging, and growing as fast as we’re seeing with Twitter, it’s really about making sure that we have the content so we can search for it and find it for our users.”
Twitter, the three-year-old web start-up that has become an internet sensation popularised by celebrities and government, attracts tens of millions of visitors every month.
In September, it received a $100 million round of financing that valued the company at $1 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.
Twitter has yet to generate significant revenue from its free service, though it has mentioned advertising and premium features as potential ways to make money.
Qu Li, president of online services at Microsoft, said data from Twitter could provide “signals” about which content on the web is most popular and most relevant to search queries.
“You can use those to augment today’s search experience,” he told a San Francisco internet conference.
From Wednesday, Twitter search results will be accessible on a special section of Bing as a beta, or test product.
Microsoft plans to present the most popular Tweets of the moment, while allowing web surfers to view Twitter messages that contain links to other web content. Microsoft will filter out spam and other extraneous data. – (Reuters)
