Google, Microsoft Strike Partnership With Twitter

Microblogging phenomenon Twitter has of late emerged as the most sought after property on the internet after it announced deals with the two biggest names of the Silicon Valley, Microsoft and Google, on the same day.

Of the two, Microsoft Corp. was the first one to announce deals with both Twitter and Facebook to include their users’ updates and tweets in its signature search engine Bing, at the Web 2.0 symposium in San Francisco.

Announcing the Twitter deal on a Microsoft blog, Paul Yiu, the company’s head of search said: “Twitter is producing millions of tweets every minute on every subject you can imagine. The power of those tweets as a form of data that can be surfaced in search is enormous”.

The announcement from the Redmond-based software company was widely being regarded as a major triumph for it until Google came into the picture and announced a similar agreement with Twitter.

The search engine giant’s blog post quoted: “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.”

The deals between search engines and Twitter have heralded a new era of “real-time” search where the focus would shift to indexing the hot topics of conversation as well as latest stories as web users are increasingly turning to online services like Twitter to get in touch with each other.