This wasn't common knowledge? Google has been returning results from Twitter and forums within seconds of the content being posted for a long time now. Their "realtime" search is exactly this. If Twitter lets people buy access to the "firehouse" or what not, it stands to reason that Google would be the first in line for such access.
Yeah. This was big, public news. Last year within a week, Bing + Google both paid Twitter millions of dollars for "firehose" access.
The reason I remember it pretty well is 1) Lots of people made "...finally making money" jokes, and 2) Both Bing and Google made separate realtime URLs shortly after.
I didn't know about it: I must have missed it or glosed over it in my daily (hourly?!) readings of tech and web news. Either way, that's why I posted it now. That said, Google's realtime feed has always been so, well, "realtime," I didn't even notice a change.
