It’s been a while since Google and Twitter formed a partnership which saw tweets slowly creeping up on Google search results. When this feature rolled out in May, Twitter results where only coming up on IOS and android devices, but now Twitter results will appear on Google searches on desktops.

Now with this change we can search for hashtags, trending topics and even Twitter accounts on Google search. Live events are not a new thing for Google but with Twitter results coming up it adds an extra dimension. While Twitter has its own searching method a study has suggested that we prefer to use Google search. It makes it possible to judge the reaction that comes from Twitter to breaking news. This however does eliminate the need to do multiple searches.

As mentioned above tweets are now on desktops, the reason this is good for Twitter is that if we search a random topic on Google search,  Twitter results will come up even if it doesn’t have any relevance to Twitter. This change also means that there is less importance on Twitter followers, because your tweets will enter Google’s search domain meaning someone doesn’t have to be following you or even have Twitter to see your tweets. This will help Twitter because according to studies in 2014 only 36% of people used Twitter on a daily basis compared to 46% the previous year. So with the desktop searches being introduced Twitter are hoping Google can push them up to compete with the likes of Facebook. Twitters CEO said “We’ve got the opportunity now to drive a lot of attention to and aggregate eyeballs.” So for example if something happens on Twitter, Google can feed it through and this could be a very productive partnership for Twitter.

With this change Google now has access to Twitters Firehose. This is a system that puts roughly 9,000 of our tweets per second in the upper regions of the internet and Google can use this to put results up on Google search. In the past Google would have had to trawl through our 9,000 tweets a second which wasn’t time efficient for Google.

Businesses that have a strong following on Twitter and tweet about news in their area will benefit from this change and see more traffic coming through. The reason for this is that people will search for news in the businesses certain area and their tweets will come up on Google search results, because they have a strong following on Twitter. Whereas if it was just one person tweeting about a certain subject their tweets will not show because they might not have the following a business does. Businesses that don’t use Twitter on a regular basis will stagnate due to this change with competitors showing up over them. So it is important for businesses to be active on Twitter if they want to be recognised and have more traffic coming to them.

 

Back in 2009 Google and Twitter made a deal so tweets would come up on Google searches. However this broke down two years later suggesting the reason was down to Twitter wanting more control over the content on Twitter. Deals like this with Google will be a major boost for Twitter because linking up with Google will make Twitter more recognisable and known more globally. With tweets appearing on search results this could have the effect of more people signing up on Twitter, because you don’t need to have an account to see the results or click on the links so this will entice new people to register an account on Twitter, which will be extremely important for Twitters existence.