Google Partners with Twitter to Provide Real Time Search Results

Well, real time search has been a nice topic for discussion for quite some time now amongst the search enthusiast, there has also been a lot of speculations if Google is going to acquire Twitter or not. With all that happening Google has officially announced in their blog yesterday that they have got into an agreement with Twitter to include Twitter updates in relevant search results.

Including Twits in real time updates on search results would definitely enhance the user experience to great extent particularly for certain time and place sensitive searches. While it is not something that they are launching immediately, they are definitely working on how they can smoothly integrate Twits with Google search to offer an overall better search experience to their users.

Google have sighted an example related to weather conditions in a ski resort, while that is definitely a good possible use, I think once the Twitter and Google search integration becomes complete we might get to see some more interesting info like the following :

a) Traffic conditions in street : people often tweet when they get stuck in traffic somewhere

b) Real time updates on any event / accident via Tweeples who might be present at the spot

c) Special offers that are exclusive to Twitter users now would start reaching more audience , example: @Dell

d) Updated Flight information right from Google search results page via Twits – a la @JetBlue

e) Movie Reviews ; Short and crisp feedback on movies, very common in Twitter.

These are just some of my random thoughts on how things might change once this integration is complete.

Also, the SEO in me is thinking about a different aspect. Will Google be respecting links that a website gets from Twits while deciding on the organic rankings ? For those of you who would like to pic your brains on this, here is a small piece of information..

Bit.ly, tinyurl.com, Su.pr – some of the popular URL shortening services used in Twitter actually offers a 301 redirects to the main URL 🙂

If not as tradition links, is there going to be any direct correlation between Twitter mentions for a website and its organic rankings ?

What do you think ?