What Google's Loss of Twitter Stream Means to Realtime Search?

What Google’s Loss of Twitter Stream Means to Realtime Search?

by PJ Fusco | July 19, 2011

A few weeks ago on the Monday, which was Fourth of July, most folks were Tweeting about eating too many hot dogs or their plans for watching fireworks light up the sky. Nothing new here, right? Well there was something new. One could not find one’s Twittersteam in Google Realtime Search anymore.

Why the change?

On July 4th Google declared its independence from Twitter. This is to say that Google shut down Realtime Search, and its real-time adjunct Wonder Wheel, on July 2 as a result of Google’s agreement with Twitter going up in smoke.

While Google insists that all the contract expiration means is that Twitter will no longer have “privileged status” in its Realtime Search results, we should note that there are other sources that Google can tap into for harvesting real-time social consciousness. Namely, Google+ and Google +1.

The reasons behind the non-renewal of the contract between Google and Twitter remains unclear, but the effects have been immediate. Google Realtime Search has vanished behind a 404 error message for now.

We find this odd, because Google Realtime Search results are still being populated in web search results when there is enough real-time content gathered about the query from Google News and Blog Search links, as well as Facebook fan page updates, FriendFeed updates and beyond.

Source: eMarketer news

It does appear that Twitter, Facebook and Google are indeed building “Chinese walls” around their social content empires. While Google certainly leads the pack in generating online advertising revenues (shown above) from organizing other people’s content, social media advertising revenues had remained out of reach for Google in lieu of securing agreements (or acquiring) social content from other venues.

The war over making money off from other people’s content is dot-com age-old. What with Bing now serving up English search results in China for Baidu and locking up a deal with Apple to be the default search service on iPad, there is more pressure on Google for global search market share that ever before.

We contend that Google’s loss of access to the Twittersphere is just one skirmish in a larger war for procuring advertising dollars around social, user-generated content. The real battles are yet to be fought over who owns the content aggregated on today’s social media venues.

Actionable Insight: For now, it’s important that search engine marketers represent their company’s goods and services on all fronts, which just means its online business as usual for us all.

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