It didn't take long for the critics to aim their weapons at the new Google+ integration in Google Search. There's plenty to criticize to be sure, but the most interesting reply came from Twitter which argued that it was concerned for the health of the web, given that Google chose to integrate Google+ and nothing else.
It's a valid concern, but Twitter is not entirely the victim in this. In response to Google's announcement of the new features, Twitter had quite a lot to say.
"For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet," Twitter said in a statement.
"Often, they want to know more about world events and breaking news. Twitter has emerged as a vital source of this real-time information, with more than 100 million users sending 250 million Tweets every day on virtually every topic," it added.
"As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant results," it said.
"We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users," Twitter explained.
Twitter has some valid concerns, but it does exaggerate a bit. People will not find it harder to discover things from Twitter, nothing changed, the same organic results will be shown and many of them may contain links to Twitter, though sometimes lower in the page since personal results will be mixed in.
However, it will be easier to find stuff from Google+ as opposed to content on Twitter, but not harder than before to find stuff from Twitter, at least not significantly so.
Companies rarely come out and speak their mind like this, so Twitter should be commended, even if it couldn't resist the urge to brag about just how big and important it was. But it is even more surprising that Google responded and it was quite a zinger.
"We are a bit surprised by Twitter's comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer, and since then we have observed their rel=nofollow instructions," Google
said via its official Google+ page.
The most interesting part is that, for the first time, we know whom to blame for the Twitter - Google deal falling apart. According to Google, Twitter was the one that ended negotiations. As a result, Google lost access to the full Twitter stream.
While it can index Twitter pages with its regular tools, it is hard to do it in real time and show the very latest tweets in results.
What's more, Google is implying that Twitter is in fact keeping itself from being featured in Google search results by using the "rel=nofollow" link attribute. This doesn't completely block Google from indexing pages linked this way, but it does make it harder in some cases.
Twitter may have its own take on things; it could argue that it didn't walk away from negotiations, but that Google didn't agree to its terms. Rumor says that Twitter asked a big sum for access to the stream, below $100 million, €78.2 million, but still big.
It the end, it doesn't really matter, not for now. For now, Google+ is featured prominently in Google search, Facebook and Twitter are not. And, even though they may complain, neither one is really looking to let Google access more data, something Google is more than happy with. That's why it built Google+ in the first place. Of course, Google doesn't really need access to more data than it already does to integrate Facebook or Twitter into some of its new social features.
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