Google's Real Time Search Coming Back, Without Twitter but with Google+

Not so long ago the future was real-time. Tools like Twitter showed us a world where information travels at light speed and where days and hours became minutes and seconds.

Too bad this future is already the past, Google buried its real-time search feature a few weeks back after it failed to struck a deal with Twitter.

Twitter, from what can be gathered, was more than willing to continue to serve Google with the full data firehose, supplying its real-time search engine with thousands of tweets each second.

For whatever reason, Google hasn't renewed the deal, maybe Twitter asked for too much money (possible but unlikely, especially since Google has very deep pockets) or maybe Google felt that Google+ would supply it with enough data.

The latter version seems more in line with Google's, sometimes arrogant, approach. It prefers internal tools and data to third-party ones, whenever possible.

Without the Twitter firehose, Google's real-time search, a once touted feature, which had other data sources, was left dry, so to speak, so Google disabled it altogether.

But it's coming back and, as it said initially, it will rely on Google+ as well as other data.

At a conference, Google Fellow Amit Singhal, who oversees search, said that real-time search simply wasn't good enough, but that it's coming back.

"The value the product was providing was not enough," Singhal said, according to Mashable.

Google is now working on integrating Google+ data into the stream, as well as from other sources. There's no indication that Twitter data is coming back any time soon though.

In response to another question, Singhal also said that Google+ search, an obvious missing feature of the social network, is coming soon and that Google engineers already diligently working on it. [via Mashable]