Google, Twitter Reach Deal To Show Tweets On Google Search Results: Report

Twitter Inc., which is set to announce its fourth quarter earnings on Thursday, has reached an agreement with Google Inc. to make tweets visible on the latter's search results, Bloomberg reported. Sometime in 2015, tweets will start to appear on the search engine as they are posted.

Google has reportedly been given access to Twitter’s "firehose," the stream of data created by users of the microblogging service, whereas Google had to previously crawl Twitter for the data. A source told Bloomberg that there is no advertising revenue being exchanged between the two, which could suggest that Twitter will receive data-licensing revenue for its content.

Twitter also provides its data to Microsoft’s Bing service and Yahoo!, and this week announced deals with news app Flipboard and Yahoo Japan.

The company recently announced that it plans to improve the visibility of tweets outside the service itself, pushing promoted tweets as ads onto other services. “What makes Twitter unique is that Tweets can flow from Twitter to other mediums seamlessly, like TV, websites and mobile applications,” Twitter's Senior Director Ameet Ranadive said in a statement. “These new partnerships open a significant opportunity to extend the reach of their message to a larger audience.”

Twitter and Google had a similar deal from 2009 to 2011, but sources told Bloomberg that former Chief Operating Officer Ali Rowghani had allowed the deal to lapse, wanting to keep more control over Twitter’s content. In 2011, Google launched its own social network, Google+, hoping to compete with other networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Twenty-three percent of online adults reportedly use Twitter, up from 18 percent in 2013, according to a University of Michigan report.