Twitter and Google have reportedly struck a deal that will see real-time Tweets make a return to search results.
People with knowledge of the situation said people will begin to see tweets in search results right when they're posted in the first half of this year, adding that the agreement will give the search giant access to Twitter's firehose, the stream of data generated by the company's 284 million-plus users, according to Bloomberg.
The sources, which asked not to be named since the deal isn't public, also said engineers from both companies are already working on including Twitter's 140-character updates in search results again.
The report follows over two years after real-time tweets were searchable on Google, as the company previously had to crawl Twitter's website to find information, Tech Times reported. This process took a lot of time and resources and risked the possibility of Twitter's servers crashing.
Google and Twitter had a similar deal in 2009, which gave Google full access to the firehose. However, Twitter decided not to renew the agreement in 2011 due to then-COO Ali Rowghani wanting more keep more control over the company's content and how users searched for content.
The decision presented several problems for Twitter, such as journalists complaining about not being able to search for old Tweets as easily as they could before and CEO Dick Costolo having a harder time generating ad revenue from a larger audience due to the site not being as visible in search engines, Tech Times reported. The reported deal could help Costolo bring in the new users he needs.
The new deal, if legitimate, presents several benefits for Twitter, as the sources say that while there is no advertising revenue involved in the agreement, Google will pay "data-licensing" revenue, which gives the microblogging service a chance to make even more than it did last year, TechCrunch reported. With Twitter already announcing that Promoted Tweets would appear third-party apps and sites, tweets appearing in Google's Search results gives the company another way to improve its advertising business.
Twitter declined to comment on the deal.
