Google-Twitter deal will see tweets appear in search results

Twitter and Google have signed a deal which will promote tweets in search results making them more searchable.

News of the deal comes from a report by Bloomberg, which is quoting anonymous sources who claim to have knowledge of the matter.

The sources say that tweets will be visible in search results from the second they are posted to the microblogging site, with the feature expected to roll out in the first half of 2015.

Engineers at Google and Twitter are both working on the integration, already replacing the current system which sees Google's search spiders having to crawl Twitter's feed to find results.

The new system will likely see Twitter provide direct access to Google to its back-end systems to make it easier to find tweets.

Twitter's CEO Dick Costolo has been pushing to make tweets and Twitter more visible and more accessible and the company's latest attempt to do that is giving new users an "instant timeline" which makes it much easier to start using the service.

Revenue sharing

This is not the first time the companies have had such a deal in place. Between 2009 and 2011 tweets showed up in Google results but that deal ended as Google launched its own social network Google+ which it hoped would rival Facebook and Twitter.

The exact financial terms of the deal have not been revealed by the sources speaking to Bloomberg but they did say there is no advertising revenue involved but Twitter would receive data-licensing revenue.

IBTimes UK has contacted both Google and Twitter for comment on the matter. Google said it had nothing to share on the rumours and at the time of publication, Twitter has not offered a response.

Twitter will report its quarterly earnings on Thursday, 5 February when it could make the deal with Google official.