Report: Twitter & Google Have Deal To Index Tweets Again

Twitter and Google have reached a deal to make tweets easier to find online, according to a report by Bloomberg Business tonight.

The deal will give Google access to Twitter’s firehose — the data stream of the 140-character service — and therefore make tweets available for indexing by the search engine immediately after they are posted. The report, citing unnamed sources, said Google and Twitter engineers are already working on the project and that it will be switched on in the first half of 2015.

The reported agreement marks a rekindling of a relationship that ended in 2011, when Google killed Real Time Search and Twitter cut off access to the firehose. Since then, Google has had to crawl Twitter to index tweets and finding specific Twitter updates via the search engine has been hit and miss.

But with Twitter working to improve the experience for logged-out users — and show investors that such people are a valuable part of the audience — this move makes a lot of sense. Already, last year, Twitter made an adjustment that allowed Google and other search engines to crawl its top 50,000 hashtagged search pages. That change produced a 10-fold increase in the number of logged-out users coming to Twitter (up to 75 million a month by November).

Twitter executives have been making the case that the company’s off-Twitter audience of 500 million represents a sizable business opportunity. This week, Twitter announced its first deal to target that audience with ads. Thursday, the company will release its fourth quarter financial report.

Twitter spokesperson Will Stickney declined to comment about the reported firehose deal. A Google spokesperson hadn’t responded to an email when this post was published.

Read Sarah Frier’s full report about the news at Bloomberg Business.

About The Author

Martin Beck

Martin Beck was Third Door Media's Social Media Reporter from March 2014 through December 2015.