Remember all of those questions about Twitter generating revenue? That point may now be moot, as the microblogging company has reached separate deals with both Google and Microsoft that will let the search engines integrate Twitter updates into their results pages.
None of the three parties have disclosed terms of the deal, and although Twitter surely profited, chief executive Evan Williams told The New York Times that revenue was "not the focus of the deals."
Microsoft's Bing has already launched a beta version of its Twitter search, available at bing.com/twitter. Google's service will launch in the coming weeks. Bing has no plans to run ads on its Twitter search service, while Google said it may do so at a later time, according to the Times.
The deals represent a major leap in the field of real-time search. The amount of time required to crawl and index pages has prevented major search engines from successfully incorporating the steady stream of social media updates into their search results. Direct access to Twitter's data stream will let Bing and Google give searchers access to breaking news and up-to-the-minute conversations.
Microsoft had previously experimented with Twitter by including updates from popular Twitterers in its search results. The company will now use information such as quality, keywords, and number of retweets to rank the search results, according to Mashable. Twitter's current search function only sorts tweets chronologically.