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Report: Google Will Get Access To Twitter’s Firehose Again

The agreement, reported by Bloomberg Business, comes 3 1/2 years after a similar arrangement ended. It will make tweets easier to find on the search giant.

Martin Beck on February 4, 2015 at 10:00 pm

Three and a half years after cutting off the flow, Twitter is turning the tweet pipeline to Google back on.

Bloomberg Business reported Wednesday night that Twitter has reached a deal with the search giant to provide access to Twitter’s firehose data stream. That will give Google the ability to index tweets immediately after they are posted. The report, citing unnamed sources, said Google and Twitter engineers are already working on the project and that it will be switched on in the first half of 2015.

A Twitter spokesperson had no comment on the report. A Google spokesperson didn’t respond to an email.

The reported agreement marks a rekindling of a relationship that ended in 2011, when Google killed Real Time Search and Twitter cut off access to the firehose. Since then, Google has had to crawl Twitter to index tweets and finding specific Twitter updates via the search engine has been spotty at best. Twitter, aiming to monetize its logged-off audience, has been working to improve its position in search results. It made a change last year that produced a 10-fold increase of traffic to Twitter by logged out users.

Read more about the deal on Marketing Land. And for more on the history of the Google-Twitter search relationship, read this by Danny Sullivan: Three Years After Breaking Up, Twitter Wants Back The Google Search Love It Once Had.

About The Author

Martin Beck

Martin Beck is Third Door Media's Social Media Reporter, covering the latest news for Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. He spent 24 years with the Los Angeles Times, serving as social media and reader engagement editor from 2010-2014. A graduate of UC Irvine and the University of Missouri journalism school, Beck started started his career at the Times as a sportswriter and copy editor. Follow Martin on Twitter (@MartinBeck), Facebook and/or Google+.