Twitter’s Full Google Search Integration Is Coming In May

Details are still sparse, but the Twitter “firehose” is coming to Google sometime next month.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said during Twitter’s Q1 earnings call today to expect the integration to be rolled out in May, but that he didn’t have a specific date to share. He also mentioned, almost in passing, that Twitter is talking with Apple to introduce Twitter content into Spotlight search on iOS and OS X devices.

He didn’t elaborate on what to expect from the integration with Apple or for that matter with Google, which he first acknowledged in February during Twitter’s last earnings call.

“That Google deal and relationship is all about driving our total audience strategy,” Costolo said during today’s call. “The goal is to get people to consume content and engage with that content whether they log in or not.”

By giving Google access to all public tweets, Twitter hopes to take better advantage of the more than 500 million people who visit Twitter every month without logging into the social network. That goal is front and center for a company that is struggling to retain users and increase its user base fast enough to satisfy investors. “There’s absolutely an opportunity to go monetize that attention and traffic,” Costolo said. “We want to make sure we iterate on the experiences to get them right first.”

Twitter and Google had a firehose deal from 2009 to 2011 but it expired and currently only a portion of tweets are indexed by the search giant.

Postscript: Turns out Twitter content is already available in Apple’s Spotlight search, as BuzzFeed points out in a story today. Searching for hashtags with Spotlight (Cmd + Space Bar in OS X and swipe down on the home screen in iOS) pulls up a tweet or two and searching for a Twitter user name takes you to that Twitter profile. Here’s how a sample hashtag search looks on the Mac desktop: