Google announces deal with Twitter

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 21 (Xinhua) -- Google on Wednesday said it has reached an agreement with Twitter to include updates from the micro-blogging service in its search results, hours after a similar deal was unveiled by Microsoft.

"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," Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president, said in a blog posting.

"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 noted.

Microsoft said earlier Wednesday that Twitter's real-time data will appear in search results of Bing, the new search engine launched by the software giant in June.

Microsoft executives made the announcement at the Web 2.0 Summit held in San Francisco, saying that a partnership with social networking website Facebook will come at a later date.