Twitter’s place in Google’s desktop search is now official. After about a month of testing, Google announced the news today, appropriately, with a tweet that Twitter quickly answered:
You got it, @google. We’ll bring the Tweets. ? — Twitter (@twitter) August 21, 2015
If this sounds familiar it’s because Google started incorporating tweets on search results for US users on mobile devices in May. Now it has expanded the feature to the desktop for all English language searchers globally. The company had already extended mobile access to English users worldwide.
What it means is that tweets will show up in a carousel in the main column of search results when they are relevant. Twitter isn’t required for people to see the tweets; those who click through while not being signed onto Twitter will be taken to the network’s logged out experience.
Google is still experimenting with display, but currently the carousel is appearing within the “In the news” unit fairly high on the first page of search results. There’s no advertising component but brands with active Twitter accounts were showing up every time in some quick testing we did today. Here are examples for Bing, Samsung Mobile and The Home Depot:
Searches for topics in the news, such as “Hurricane Danny” or “Dr Dre,” turn up tweets that appear to be in real-time, mixing updates from media organizations and journalists with a few from “regular” Twitter users.
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