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Twitter?s deals with Google, Microsoft signal bright future for mobile search

Twitter?s recent deals to make its users? tweets available to both Google and Microsoft?s Bing search engine point to the future of mobile search: real-time information.

The agreements also hint at how Twitter will finally be able to monetize its 55 million visitors: targeted, relevant mobile search advertising. While neither Google or Microsoft have announced the inclusion of advertising inventory as part of their respective deals, it is undoubtedly on the near horizon.

?The main takeaway here is that real-time information is the next frontier for search, as both Google and Bing have so nicely confirmed,? said Carl Howe, director of Anywhere Consumer Research at Yankee Group, Boston. ?Because they both signed up I don?t think it changes anything in the competitive landscape of search.

?Neither one gained an advantage, because they both signed a deal with Twitter,? he said. ?There?s new content, so you?re searching real-time content as it happens, but will the ads be any different?

?No, it will be contextual as they are on any search page, so for the moment there will be no real change in the mobile advertising landscape.?

While Twitter has raised $155 million from venture capitalists, it has not yet figured out any revenue-generating model other than deals such as these, and it has not yet turned a profit.

?If you talk to the founders of Twitter, they say ?We have a million ways we could turn this into money,? but they don?t want to do that too early,? Mr. Howe said. ?I?m sure there are ways they can monetize it over time, but for the moment, they?re going to follow the ?grow the traffic first and monetize it later? model, just like YouTube did.

?Google paid billions of dollars for YouTube before it ever made a dime, and today by golly it does make money,? he said.

However Twitter plans to make money, its deals with two of the top three search players has implications for the future of advertising as the world becomes more and more mobile.

?This is another path into the mobile consumer, what we would call the anywhere consumer,? Mr. Howe said. ?So much of the old search world was  about the desktop, whereas this is search content generated by mobile subscribers, which is a new beast.

?It offers some opportunities in the future?we already have search by location,? he said. ?Search is going to be an integral part of the mobile experience.

?This is a fight for who will control the search engine for the mobile experience.?

Google touts Twitter
In the past few years, an entirely new type of data has emerged. Real-time updates like those on Twitter have appeared not only as a way for people to communicate their thoughts and feelings, but also as an interesting source of data about what is happening right now in regard to a particular topic, according to Google.

?At Google, our goal is to create the most comprehensive, relevant and fast search in the world,? wrote Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience, in a post to Google?s blog. ?Given this new type of information and its value to search, we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results.

?We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months,? she said.

?That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you'll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.?

Bada-Bing
One of the most interesting things going on today on the Internet is the notion of the real-time Web. The idea of accessing data in real time has been an elusive goal in the world of search.

Web indexes in search engines update at pretty amazing rates, given what it takes to crawl the entire Web and index it for searching, but getting that to ?real time? has been challenging. The explosive popularity of Twitter is the best example of this opportunity, according to Microsoft.

Twitter is producing millions of tweets every minute on every subject you can imagine.

?The power of those tweets as a form of data that can be surfaced in search is enormous,? wrote Paul Yiu, spokesman for the Bing social search team at Microsoft, in a blog post. ?Innovative services like Twitter give us access to public opinion and thoughts in a way that has not before been possible.

?From important social and political issues to keeping friends up to date on the minute-by-minute of our daily lives, the Web is getting more and more real time,? he said. ?Search needs to keep up.?

Shortly after Microsoft launched Bing, the company did an experiment with the team at Twitter, taking a small number of celebrities from Twitter and provided access to their tweets as part of the search result.

As per the deal, Microsoft now has access to the entire public Twitter feed. The company launched a beta version of Bing Twitter search in the U.S.

?We know that people are going to Twitter more and more for information surrounding all the latest chatter,? Mr. Yiu said. ?You can now search for what people are saying all over the Web about breaking news topics, your favorite celebrity, hometown sports team and anything else you use Twitter to stay on top of today.

?If you want to keep an eye on this topic, you can just watch the Tweets roll in,? he said. ?Or, click on ?See more Tweets about?? to go to a page full of Tweets.

?On that page, you can change the ordering to ?Best Match.??

Here Microsoft arranges Tweets differently. If someone has a lot of followers, his or her Tweet may get ranked higher. If a tweet is exactly the same as other Tweets, it will get ranked lower.

Tweets do not last more than seven days in Microsoft?s index.

?Are you a Taylor Swift fan?? Mr. Yiu said. ?Just think of all the links that are shared on Twitter that have to do with Taylor.

?To help you find these links we sift through and find the most interesting and hot trending links that other search engines usually don?t pick up on,? he said. ?Instead of the usual captions that are used for links, we decided to give you a ?social caption? and show you what people are saying about these links.?