Wondering where Google Realtime Search has gone? On July 2, Google announced that as a result of the expiration of an almost two-year-old agreement with Twitter, Google Realtime Search has been temporarily taken offline. Google Realtime relied heavily upon a special feed provided by Twitter in the agreement as its primary source of content.
Google promises that Realtime Search will not be gone for good. When Google Realtime returns, Google has suggested that results will be chock full of new content from a wide variety of social networking sources, including materials shared in the new Google+. Google will continue to index publicly available Twitter content, but the results will not appear as instantaneously as they had in Realtime Search.
But why was the deal allowed to expire when Google’s Realtime Search has relied so heavily on Twitter results, especially while Twitter continues to provide the same special feed to several of Google’s competitors, including Yahoo! and Microsoft?
Perhaps the launch of Google+ has soured Twitter’s opinion of Google, as it seems they have joined Facebook in their resistance to allowing Google to peruse content hassle-free only days after the launch of Google+.
Meanwhile, as Google goes back to the drawing board to refine Realtime, Bing’s partnership with Facebook and access to Twitter’s feed could catapult the provider to the top as the go-to for social search queries.
Why do you think Twitter has pulled the plug on Google Realtime Search?
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