Remember the days when you could search for something that was in the news on Google and get a set of realtime search results comprised mainly (but not solely) of updates from Twitter? It was a helpful feature that let you get a glance at what people were saying about a given topic at that moment, and in some cases, provided the absolute most relevant results Google could possibly deliver.
The realtime search feature went away after Google and Twitter failed to reach an agreement that would have extended the partnership. Twitter continued a similar partnership with Bing, but that just doesn’t get the usage Google does, and it appears now that Twitter may have some regrets about letting that Google deal fall apart.
This week, Twitter held its Analyst Day event, where it discussed some things it is doing to help promote user growth. One thing it didn’t really go into in its blog post about various projects it’s working on to accomplish that, is trying to get more search traffic. This is something that would obviously come if that deal were still in place. Marketing Land reports:
During the event this morning, Twitter’s CFO Anthony Noto suggested that Twitter would do more to generate search engine optimization traffic, free traffic from Google and other search engines. It’s something Noto said Twitter hadn’t really done in the past.
Trevor O’Brien, Twitter’s director of product management, expanded on this later to say that Twitter made a change earlier this year to allow Google and other search engines to crawl its top 50,000 hashtagged search pages, which has generated a 10-fold increase in the number of logged-out people coming to Twitter — helping that figure rise to 75 million per month.
It’s unclear whether Twitter has approached Google about starting up that deal again, which would actually benefit users to some extent, though it’s hard to say if Google would be interested at this point.
Truth be told, Google’s feature was never really as helpful for realtime searches as a search directly on Twitter anyway, but again, there are a lot more people using Google in the first place.
It’s worth noting that Twitter wasn’t a public company that had to worry so much about pleasing investors concerned about user growth when it didn’t renew its deal with Google.
Image via Twitter
