In with Google+, out with Google's deal with Twitter.
What once felt a tad tacked-on, the deal with the search giant and the Twitter has been left to expire. Signed in 2009, Google's real-time search results via Twitter's firehose led to an "interest graph" that didn't grab the public quite as much as Facebook's "social graph." Plus, Microsoft's Bing had a similar deal with SF's Twitter -- so the deal bought Google some time as it developed its own social network.
Google added this, from Search Engine Land:
"Since October of 2009, we have had an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results through a special feed, and that agreement expired July 2. While we will not have access to this special feed from Twitter, information on Twitter that's publicly available to our crawlers will still be searchable and discoverable on Google."
Not seen as integral to its net experience, Google let the deal expire without renewal. As a result, and as of Tuesday morning, Real Time Search is defunct -- complete with a hard 404.
RTS will return, Google says, with Google+ information, as well as other third-party sources.
