Earlier this year, Google and Twitter made nice and struck a deal to bring more tweets to Google search results. Today, the fruits of said deal are going live on mobile.
Of course, it’s not as if you couldn’t surface tweets in Google search results if you tried – but this new deal gives real-time tweets more prominence in mobile search results.
For instance, a search for Taylor Swift may display a carousel of her tweets at the top:
Or a search for a timely topic like Malcolm X (it’s his 90th birthday today) might bring up a carousel of recent tweets about him:
Of course, more specific Twitter-oriented searches like “NASA Twitter” or “#madmen” are more likely to pull up Twitter results, and place them higher up on the page.
It appears that what some spotted in the wild earlier this month is pretty much how Google plans to use tweets – at least for now. Currently, these Twitter-heavy results will only show up for U.S. user searching in English, and only on the iOS and Android Google apps and the mobile web.
The companies say it’s coming to desktop “shortly”.
“It’s a great way to get real-time info when something is happening. And it’s another way for organizations and people on Twitter to reach a global audience at the most relevant moments,” says Google.
“By deeply integrating Twitter’s real-time content into Google search, we hope you find it easier than ever to explore your interests across both Twitter and Google,” says Twitter.
It’s important to note that this isn’t a rebirth of Google’s realtime search feature. But it is a step toward more real-time information in Google search. Twitter has over 6,000 tweets per second coming in through its firehose – and now Google, once again, has access to it.