

Twitter Reaches Deal to Show Tweets in Google Search Results - knes
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-05/twitter-said-to-reach-deal-for-tweets-in-google-search-results

======
majani
I don't think Twitter realizes the value of their own search engine. If
Twitter could dedicate more resources towards approximate string matching, and
put Twitter search as the main attraction on the logged out homepage, it could
drive adoption of Twitter among casual users. I should be able to search "new
Mugabe meme" after hearing about it, and Twitter should show me pictures of
his recent fall, with real-time updates.

But as of now it's pretty much an exact match search, which is frustrating if
you don't know the exact term you're looking for(in my example, the exact term
is "Mugabe fall"). On to of that, it's hidden away from the logged out
homepage. Rather than tackle this problem themselves, they've outsourced the
heavy lifting to Google. What a MySpace move

~~~
tomphoolery
I disagree, I think they did this in order to capture _more_ users. Not
everyone uses Twitter. I believe Twitter is shooting for the "everyone"
demographic, not just kids, the media/artists and tech-savvy people who got
into it "before it was cool". If that is true, that means they are attempting
to leverage Google, which everyone's already using, in an attempt to boost
their legitimacy as a source of real-time information and get more exposure.
Twitter's a media company, after all, so they are looking for more and more
exposure whenever they can get it. It wouldn't be surprising to see your
strategy implemented at Twitter after this deal has come and gone, if Twitter
is playing their cards right they will have actually used Google to steal at
least some of Google's search traffic away from them.

That said, I also don't believe Twitter's long game is search. I think they're
trying to re-invent how we access information. Instead of searching for
something, what if you could subscribe to a topic and just get information
handed to you constantly?

~~~
wutbrodo
> Not everyone uses Twitter.

Twitter in particular is one of the cases where places like HN disappointingly
fall for the fallacy of assuming that their observations are an unbiased
sample (and thus that "most/tons of people use Twitter"). Twitter's numbers
have always been shockingly low (compared to their influence); I remember
finding out a couple years ago that active members of the narrowest possible
metric of actual social usage of Google+ roughly matched or outpaced Twitter
(this was before many of the integrations like Youtube which may have drawn
more people to the G+ stream). That was the case for quite a long amount of
time.

It's probably great news for Twitter that their user numbers so badly lag
their influence, since that means the potential for growth is very, very high
(though it does raise the question why this gap exists to such an unusual
degree).

~~~
jonifico
Definitely true! I think they're also going for other places where Twitter
doesn't affect most people, talk South America, Africa, Asia... It's just this
North American perspective that gets people out of context. The world's kind
of a big place, y'know

------
jsnathan
There were some rumors [1] recently that Google was considering to buy
Twitter.

Now I don't know if there's anything to that, but in light of Facebook
snatching up Instagram, (not to mention WhatsApp), Google moving in on Twitter
seems like a fairly logical counter-move.

And just think of all the data!

My point is, this deal might be at Google's initiative, not Twitter's, and
might represent the first step in that direction. It's just conjecture, of
course..

[1]: [http://venturebeat.com/2015/01/23/google-is-absolutely-
posit...](http://venturebeat.com/2015/01/23/google-is-absolutely-positively-
not-going-to-buy-twitter-yet/)

------
ykumar6
I don't understand how this is a good deal for Twitter, Stackoverflow and any
website that generates content and makes money using ads

Google generates revenue via ads, the same business you are in. And Google has
a huge advantage. Embedding content into their search stream makes Google
better, and stickier.

If Twitter is giving away it's content to Google, it's probably not at the
premium it could charge for ads on it's marketplace but at huge discount via
an API

This doesn't fair well for any website in this category. Google has found a
way to compete with you for page views

~~~
CaveTech
If it wasn't a good deal, Twitter wouldn't be doing it. They were in the
position of power and chose to trade it for something.

Twitters growth hasn't been the greatest over the past little while, improving
their discoverability and brand power is bound to help them in the future. And
there's always the potential for promoted tweets to show up in Google
searches, which in turn helps twitter sell more ads.

~~~
sparkzilla
>If it wasn't a good deal, Twitter wouldn't be doing it.

People make bad deals all the time. Surely the issue isn't that more people
need to discover Twitter, but that they have to make more money from those who
are already on it?

~~~
slgeorge
But since marketeers basically consider "reach" to be the most significant
measure of utility the two points are necessarily in conflict. Bottom line
could be that if you have more reach, your paid services are more valuable.

------
tannerc
What am I missing here? How does seeing tweets (unless they are intelligently
selected) help me when searching for something on Google?

As of late: I only rely on Google for finding the best place to get an answer
for a question I know exists in reliable places for the subject matter (re:
programming, cooking, etc.). If I suddenly start seeing tweets in my search
results, how does that improve my search experience?

The immediate exception that comes to mind would be related to real-time
events, but even then...how much value can 140 characters be for the website
that has indexed "everything?"

~~~
stevenjohns
Might be something like Bing where searching a famous person's name would
return a lot of content about them [1], such as their social media links,
songs, movies or TV shows they were involved in [2], Wikipedia excerpts,
photos, etc. They might just embed that user's tweets or something in the
search results now. Also note the "Tweeted about Bill Gates" section in the
first link.

[1]
[http://www.bing.com/search?q=Bill+Gates&go=Submit&qs=n&form=...](http://www.bing.com/search?q=Bill+Gates&go=Submit&qs=n&form=QBLH&pq=bill+gates&sc=0-0&sp=-1&sk=&cvid=1701107824094c0eae51bb8239789d3c)

[2]
[http://www.bing.com/search?q=Pharrell&go=Submit&qs=n&form=QB...](http://www.bing.com/search?q=Pharrell&go=Submit&qs=n&form=QBRE&pq=pharrell&sc=8-14&sp=-1&sk=&cvid=67ED1A820B014897B99A123867E654E1)

------
dchuk
I know there's no single number to quantify this, but I really wonder what the
signal to noise ratio on Twitter is. Sure, if you follow good accounts there
are some gems from time to time, but it seems the vast majority of tweets are
just complete wastes of time and resources, spraying out at a ridiculous rate.

For this to add value to Google SERPs, they're going to have to dedicate some
real time, energy, and resources to process all of those tweets, something I
think I wish they'd spend on other stuff than identifying which tweets are
about someone's cat or not.

~~~
jraedisch
Twitter has a very good signal to noise ratio for me so far, even with images,
videos and promotion tweets (which are all detrimental to quality). Part of
that success is the ease with which I can follow/unfollow people. It is often
the second point of contact to people I met somewhere, e.g. conferences or
other social gatherings. That said I have just uninstalled the mobile app,
because I got an e-mail promoting private messaging (why?) and get the overall
feeling, that I am no longer the target demographic for Twitter (tech savvy
power users that tweet themselves vs. mostly consuming VIP followers?!) since
Twitter does much to worsen my experience (aforementioned imgs, videos,
muting, etc.).

------
nnain
This could go quite wrong for Twitter. Twitter's current loyal and core
userbase uses it to express a personal opinion, a random thought or an
emotion, often peppered with slang words and abbreviations.

If people start targeting the tweets for Google Searches, the network might
become a hotchpotch of tweets optimized with SEO terms, which would be quite
irritating for most Twitter and Google Search users.

~~~
wutbrodo
This deal was already in place for years (until 2011). The importance/usage of
Twitter relative to Google was even lower then, and yet we didn't see this
happen on any sort of meaningful scale.

~~~
nnain
Ok, I didn't know that. But you would agree that the social networking scene
has changed a lot since 2011. Facebook was so much more personal and fun back
then. I was just brooding over the fact that the Jordan pilot was burnt alive
by IS two days back and not a single post about the incident showed up on my
feed (I've 400 friends on fb). And I used to be quite vocal about such things
2-3 years back, but even I've lost interest in posting anything emotional now.
Social networks have just become tools for marketeers and a personalized
newsletter for me, with the occasional comments and likes I would make on a
friend's post.

~~~
wutbrodo
Totally agree. A simple "X didn't happen before so it won't happen now" is
missing the fact that the environment has massively changed with respect to
usage and influence of Twitter and Google. As I said though, this change has
been in _favor_ of Twitter if anything (which stands to reason, since Google
was already a leviathan by then and Twitter was still quite young). So if
anything one would expect the push to sacrifice Twitter's quality for SEO on
Google to be less.

------
binoyxj
Twitter says that working to make some of its hashtag pages friendly to search
engines has generated a huge increase in search-related visits
[http://searchengineland.com/twitter-seo-more-
visitors-208160](http://searchengineland.com/twitter-seo-more-visitors-208160)

------
drivingmenuts
So, as a user of Google search, can I expect crap to show up in my search
results that I was managing to avoid by not using Twitter regularly?

------
maged
The giants of the web continue to profit themselves at the cost of an open
internet.

~~~
staunch
Fear not, the internet will route around this damage soon enough.

------
smegel
Firehose...more like a sewage pipe.

God I hope there will be a Chrome extension to block this mental diarrhea from
reaching my search results page.

