Search engines add tweets to results
SAN FRANCISCO - Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., and Microsoft Corp. are working to include Twitter Inc. messages in their search engines, giving more exposure to the social-networking service.
The companies, which lead the US search market, made separate announcements yesterday about letting users get Twitter messages, called tweets, in query results. Microsoft also plans to include Facebook Inc. messages in its Bing search engine.
Twitter, which lets people share 140-character messages, has attracted millions of users over the past year. Twitter will help search-engine users get more up-to-the-minute information on query topics, said Google vice president Marissa Mayer.
“The next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there,’’ she said on Google’s blog.
Twitter attracted about $100 million in venture capital funding last month, valuing the company at $1 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter.
So far, Twitter hasn’t converted its popularity into significant revenue. The San Francisco-based company had 20.9 million users in September, up about 18-fold from a year earlier, according to research firm ComScore Inc.
Google expects to showcase its Twitter features in coming months, Mayer said.
Microsoft is testing its Twitter features, Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president at the company’s online audience business, said.
Yahoo, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., also said it’s experimenting with Twitter feeds in search results.
