Twitter’s New Rumored Business: Improving Google and Microsoft’s Search Engines

There’s been plenty of discussion about how Google, Microsoft, and other players in search are going to address “the Twitter problem” – the service’s ability to unearth breaking news and links far quicker than traditional search engines.

In fact, just last week, Google launched a new search option that allows users to filter search results to show only links that are new within the last hour.

However, competition might not even be necessary. According to The Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital, Twitter is talking to both Google and Microsoft about licensing deals that would allow them to integrate Twitter data into their search engines.

From the report:

“According to sources familiar with the situation–Twitter is in advanced talks with Microsoft and Google separately about striking data-mining deals, in which the companies would license a full feed from the microblogging service that could then be integrated into the results of their competing search engines.”

Continuing, All Things Digital says that such deals would be worth “several million dollars” to Twitter and potentially include ongoing revenue sharing.

There are of course plenty of search engines that already utilize Twitter data, and Bing actually already launched one. Twitter could conceivably provide added value in the form of a truly full feed that includes all tweets (currently, Twitter search only goes several days back).

It’s certainly an interesting new twist on the evolving Twitter business model story, that points towards the company’s desire to remain independent and become financially viable, as opposed to get acquired by someone like Google or Microsoft. Now, we’ll have to wait and see if this actually happens, or gets filed away with the seemingly dozens of other Twitter business rumors we’ve seen pop up in recent months.

Reviews: Bing, Google, Twitter

Tags: Google, microsoft, Search, search engines, twitter