Twitter now has agreements with both Bing and Google to give them access to its full feed of public Tweets. Both search engines have been yearning to drink directly from Twitter’s the realtime data of micro-messages. An early version of Bing’s Twitter search is already live, and it will soon add public Facebook updates to its search results as well.
While financial terms of the deals were not disclosed, full access to Twitter’s data stream is very valuable to both search engines. Depending on how much Twitter was able squeeze out of Google and Bing for these licensing deals, they are likely to provide its first major source of revenue.
Tweets and other realtime data streams are valuable to Google and Bing because for many types of searches and the most recent information is often the most relevant. As a result Google and Bing need access to this stream of data if they want to keep their results fresh and relevant.
Up until now, they had to try to index Twitter’s site selectively by concentrating on high-profile Twitterers like celebrities. Twitter wouldn’t let their robots gobble up and index every Tweet because its servers wouldn’t be able to take that kind of pounding. But Twitter didn’t just want to hand over the feed of all of its public Tweets to the search engines without getting paid for it either.
For the search engines, tweets can be indexed, and looked for patterns and spikes in keywords and shared links to get a better sense of what people across the Web are paying attention to at any given moment. This data can then be folded back into regular search results, even if the top result isn’t a Tweet.
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