Twitter Scolds Google for Social-Search Development

Google's move to give Google content enhanced visibility in search results won't be evident for a while yet. Google is taking the next few weeks to roll out the changes, and it's possible that only active users of the social-networking platform will notice anything different even then. But Twitter has already registered its concern by worrying aloud that the shift will make it harder for people to find the most relevant information online. The company issued the following statement hours after Google described its plan: For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet. Often, they want to know more about world events and breaking news. Twitter has emerged as a vital source of this real-time information, with more than 100 million users sending 250 million tweets every day on virtually every topic. As we've seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and tweets are often the most relevant results. We're concerned that as a result of Google's changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that 's bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users. It's true that Google's deeper foray into social search will lack input from Facebook, Twitter or Flickr. Google once subscribed to a fire hose of data from Twitter that it used to power real-time results, but it ended the arrangement in July. Search rival Bing, part of Microsoft, has a similar partnership with Twitter. The two companies publicly agreed to extend the agreement in September by tweeting at each other's handles. Bing also has a search partnership with Facebook in which users are signaled if their friends "liked" a result.

Twitter Scolds Google for Social-Search Development

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