Google and Twitter revived search engine partnership

Recently, Google and Twitter revived a partnership the companies used to have that allowed the search engine to display real-time tweets in its results. The two companies had a similar arrangement several years ago, but the deal lapsed in 2011. As a result, Google search results tended to suffer from having a lack of the biggest source of real-time content on the Internet.

Twitter stands to benefit from the new partnership, as well. The real-time messaging site has struggled to increase its customer base ever since it went public. Having tweets show up on Google search pages will be a powerful inducement for people to use Twitter to highlight their content.

How does Google show Twitter results?

Tweets that show up on Google search pages will come from people and organizations that the company deems important enough and authoritative enough to display prominently. Celebrities, such as Taylor Swift, and high-profile entities, such as NASA, will tend to show up high in the search rankings, with others not showing as prominently or not being displayed at all. The search results will note that they come from Twitter, which will serve as an incentive to go to the messaging site to view the page, something that will benefit Twitter.

How many tweets are showing up in Google results?

A company called Stone Temple Consulting had started to track how many tweets show up on Google search pages, starting before the new partnership was consummated. Stone Temple concluded that a 466 percent increase of indexing of tweets on Google took place between February and June of 2015. The number seems enormous, but it still represents just 3.4 percent of available tweets.

With the new partnership, the number of tweets that will be displayed on Google search pages is expected to grow steadily. But because an enormous amount of tweets exists, and Google is picky about what gets searched, at no time will every tweet that is sent show up on search pages.

How do you get your tweets to display on Google?

Stone Temple advises that a person using Twitter take a number of measures to increase their authority. A tweeter needs to gain prominence on Twitter, cultivating not only the largest number of followers as possible but the ones with the greatest authority. Getting important followers who are willing to retweet and favor your tweets will go a long way to getting you displayed on Google. And, as with everything on the Internet, the quality of the tweets and the content they point to is all important.