back to article Get off Twitter – and onto Google if you want to find TWITS and tweets

Twitter has reportedly inked a deal with Google so its tweets are once again embedded in the advertising giant's search results. Twitter has 284 million active monthly users, apparently, and claims to have 185 billion unique views of tweets outside its website. However, slower user growth has prompted the company to look for …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Meh

    Duckduckgo.

  2. PleebSmash
    Paris Hilton

    ehhh

    Knock it if you want, but real time tweets are a pretty good or at least a possible way to gauge public opinion, get instant reactions to live events, see if/when websites have stopped working etc.

    What kills me is that there is no search box on Twitter's front page (not logged in). I had to type search.twitter.com to get a redirect to https://twitter.com/search-home.

    https://twitter.com/hashtag/BrianWilliamsMisremembers?src=tren

    Google's move is just a continuation of hoovering up data and adding more semantic wolfram-like search. Like snippets from Wikipedia, Google News results, or now a box of 2-3 tweets. As long as it doesn't crowd search results/vertical space it is probably good. For someone who still uses Google anyway.

    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      Re: ehhh

      Knock it if you want, but real time tweets are a pretty good or at least a possible way to gauge public opinion, get instant reactions to live events, see if/when websites have stopped working etc.

      Nope, self-selection rules that out.

      As for server monitoring. Did that with SMS (much more reliable) over 10 years ago.

      1. PleebSmash

        Re: ehhh

        It's not just "is it down". It's "what happened". Site owners will take to Twitter to explain downtime.

        1. sabroni Silver badge
          Thumb Up

          Re: get instant reactions to live events

          Or, if you're promoting a show, it's a good way of trying to drum up support. We went to a wrestling show recently where one of the story lines was started a couple of days before on Twitter by one of the male wrestlers claiming that one of the women fancied him, which she was not happy about! It's a good way of getting the fans involved before the event and keeping stories going.

          1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

            Re: get instant reactions to live events

            @sabroni - that's known as PR and will use whatever medium is currently available. Once the media fall out of love with Twitter we'll see things like What's App being used for the same thing.

            1. sabroni Silver badge

              @Charlie Clark, Once the media fall out of love with Twitter

              Not really. The media aren't interested in wrestling tweets, certainly not from a promotion that only works in Bristol, but Bristol wrestling fans are. This isn't a way of generating column inches or time on the news, it's a way of communicating directly to the fans without using the traditional media. It is PR, but direct to the consumer.

        2. Charlie Clark Silver badge
          Thumb Down

          Re: ehhh

          It's not just "is it down". It's "what happened". Site owners will take to Twitter to explain downtime.

          Only when it doesn't matter.

        3. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: ehhh

          Or alternatively: site *users* will take to twitter in droves to let you know that something is broken, which your monitoring systems haven't picked up.

  3. John Robson Silver badge

    Great Tweet...

    I'm sorry, I'm confused...

  4. Valeyard

    hm..

    i highly doubt you're more likely to find your answer in a short tweet than you are in the articles google would have served up anyway, so this is just adding noise to the results

    1. Mark 65

      Re: hm..

      i highly doubt you're more likely to find your answer in a short tweet than you are in the articles google would have served up anyway, so this is just adding noise to the results cash to the bottom line.

  5. Zog_but_not_the_first
    Alien

    Resistance is useless

    See title

  6. skeptical i
    Meh

    exclude (source=twitter.com) option?

    Twaddle (and the rest of the blithersphere) is not of value for 99% of my work, but could theoretically be useful on occasion (for example, if someone had posted live from a courtroom trial that was closed to on-camera media coverage). For the vast bulk of most of our search efforts, though, there IS a way to exclude results from twaddle, right? Like site!:twitter.com?

    1. Valeyard

      Re: exclude (source=twitter.com) option?

      -twitter -tweet would probably do it

      1. petef

        Re: exclude (source=twitter.com) option?

        That should be spelled -site:twitter.com

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Twitter just got a lot funnier..

    .. now they announced, with no apparent desire for irony, that you can have *cough* "private" *cough* messages. Oh yes, PLEASE share things with "just your friends" on a network where "private" is but a coding mistake away from public.

    The funny thing is, if this message had not arrived in my mailbox on a Friday I would have almost thought they were really serious about this .. What? They are?

    Bwahahahaha - come on, pull the other one. Who would fall for that?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: on a network where "private" is but a coding mistake away from public.

      It's called "the internet".

  8. Martin
    FAIL

    Oh, marvellous.

    I was delighted when Twitter results stopped appearing on Google. The vast majority of times, they were just random noise generated by idiots.

    For example, I was watching the Proms on TV one evening, when a singer came on to the stage for a performance. I didn't know much about her, so I Googled her name. The first three entries were tweets by people saying that she'd just come on stage.

    Well, I needed an excuse to use DuckDuckGo more often. Now I've got one.

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