The real-time web just got a lot more competitive with two of the largest search engines in the market announcing deals with Twitter. Both Google and Bing will now show tweets from the microblogging platform in their results pages. Both deals have been speculated for a while and now they've been made official. Google and Twitter have just announced the deal and it will be a while before this has any sort of benefit for the users.

“[W]e are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months,” Marissa Mayer, vice president of Search Products and User Experience, wrote.

Real-time information is becoming increasingly important but, initially, the big search engines were completely taken by surprise. The fact that it took half a year after Twitter hit the mainstream to reach a deal shows just how little they were expecting this. At the time Twitter began to make a splash, Google did recognize that they were far behind and that the microblogging platform was doing a much better job at distributing the latest information. But since then Google has made strides in real-time search, bringing up the response time from hours to minutes and introducing tools to take advantage of the faster delivery.

“A fast growing amount of information is coursing through Twitter very quickly, and we want there to be many ways to access that information. As part of that effort, we've partnered with Google to index the entire world of public tweets as fast as possible and present them to their users in an organized and relevant fashion,” Twitter cofounder and CEO Evan Williams wrote about the deal.

But it's no use being able to index and return the information in a matter of minutes if there's nothing to return so the Twitter deal is the next logical step. Despite a slump in growth in the past few months, Twitter is still the biggest resource for real-time information and the preferred way of spreading it. But announcing that you will include tweets in the results and doing it in a meaningful way are two different things. A number of startups have popped up to tackle the problem of Twitter search, as the site's own search engine is known to be lacking. But it's proven a much harder thing to do than it first appeared, perhaps because of the less-than-perfect Twitter API but also because of the amount of data. None of the startups have Google's money and resources though, so it should be interesting to see how things develop over the next few months.