News came out last week that Google and Twitter have struck a new deal to put real-time tweets back into Google’s search index. The companies aren’t providing much in the way of details about the deal at this point, and it’s possible that they never will, but they did confirm the deal, and indicate that it will go into effect in a few months.
Do you expect to benefit from the deal?
Years ago, when the two companies had a similar relationship, Google had a search feature called Realtime Search, which displayed a set of scrolling results at the top of the search results page on some queries (typically newsy ones). The feature didn’t rely solely on Twitter. It incorporated other sources, but it was clear that Twitter was the one that really mattered, especially when the whole feature went away upon the expiration of the companies’ initial deal.
Ever since that fell apart, Google has been lacking in the real-time department. In the early days of Google+, it seemed like Google thought it might be able to replace Twitter with its own real-time content, but obviously that never materialized to the extent of what Twitter has to offer. Meanwhile, Google would continue to index tweets in its regular search results, but it would never be able to index them in real time, and the ones it did index would only be a small percentage of the larger tweet pool.
Eric Enge’s Stone Temple Consulting released some new findings about how Google indexes tweets currently, which provides some insight into how things may change when the new deal goes into effect. His team analyzed over 133,000 tweets to see how Google indexed them, and found that about 7.4% of them were actually indexed, leaving 92.6% completely left out of the search engine.
That tells us a great deal right there. Google’s mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” As we’ve discussed in the past, Google is essentially failing that mission without Twitter’s firehose. Today, the world’s information is coming at us in extremely rapid fashion, and as far as public information goes (Facebook is working to do more with the non-public stuff), Twitter is the best provider of that rapid-fire info. How can Google possibly succeed in its stated mission if it’s only organizing a little over 7% of that information?
Stone Temple’s findings suggest that Twitter accounts with larger follower counts are getting more tweets indexed, though it may be only a correlation. Enge says he doesn’t think Google is looking specifically at follower count, but that other signals are affecting which profiles get indexed more (i.e. links to those accounts’ profiles). Either way, he notes, more value is clearly being placed on the authoritative accounts.
Out of the accounts with over a million followers that the research looks at, there were 13,435 tweets with 21% of them being indexed by Google. Out of 44,318 tweets in the 10K to 1M follower range, only 10% were indexed. For 80,842 tweets from accounts with less than 10,000 followers, just 4% were indexed.
Stone Temple says images and/or hashtags seem to increase a tweet’s chances of getting indexed with percentages registering higher than average. Mentions, on the other hand, register negatively. It also points to another of its studies, which showed that links from third-party sites have a significant impact.
“Google still loves links. 26% of the tweets with an inbound link from sites other than Twitter got indexed. That is nearly 4 times as much as the overall average rate of indexation,” Enge says in the report, adding that link quantity correlates highly with a tweet getting indexed.
They found that out of 21 accounts and 91 tweets with with over 100 inbound links, 46% were indexed. The number goes down the less inbound links there are. Those with less than ten links only saw a 7% index rate.
Be sure to check out the research for additional findings.