Google’s agreement with Twitter to carry its results has expired, taking with it much of the content that was in the service with it. Google has this explanation:
Since October of 2009, we have had an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results through a special feed, and that agreement expired on July 2.
While we will not have access to this special feed from Twitter, information on Twitter that’s publicly available to our crawlers will still be searchable and discoverable on Google.
As for other features such as social search, they will continue to exist, though without Twitter data from the special feed.
Our vision is to have google.com/realtime include Google+ information along with other realtime data from a variety of sources.
Google Realtime Search had carried content from a variety of services beyond Twitter, including Facebook fan page updates, Quora and Gowalla content, Check out the full source list:
- Twitter tweets
- Google News links
- Google Blog Search links
- Newly created web pages
- Freshly updated web pages
- FriendFeed updates
- Jaiku updates
- Identi.ca updates
- TwitArmy updates
- Google Buzz posts
- MySpace updates
- Facebook fan page updates
- Quora
- Gowolla
- Plixi
- Me2day
- Twitgoo
Still, as said, Twitter was the by far the most dominant content within the service. It’s unclear why the agreement was allowed to expire. Twitter has this to reply:
Since October 2009, Twitter has provided Google with the stream of public tweets for incorporation into their real-time search product and other uses. That agreement has now expired. We continue to provide this type of access to Microsoft, Yahoo!, NTT Docomo, Yahoo! Japan and dozens of other smaller developers. And, we work with Google in many other ways.
For its part, Google said:
Twitter has been a valuable partner for nearly two years, and we remain open to exploring other collaborations in the future.
Twitter has largely outsourced the service of Twitter search longer than a few days to Google, a deliberate decision so that Twitter could focus on other search features, such as its new Top Tweets feature
You can certainly understand why Google+ has become even more important to the service now. While Google has gotten by largely without social signals from Facebook, having its own data from Google+ gives it insulation if it now has to get by without Twitter signals, as well.
[via searchengineland]