According to Google, it began with Twitter some time back, but according to Twitter, began with Google a few days back. No matter who is right, the battle between Google and Twitter is one serious that it might cause an online World War I
This internet war of accusation began when Google began Inter grating Google Plus or G+ in their search results. This did not go down with Twitter who circulated a letter to the press saying that they are the best in real time results and attacked Google for the new “Search Your World” feature in Google searches.
Twitter letter read in part
“For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet.
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. 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.
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”
It is interesting to note how Twitter referred to the new Google experience as “bad for the people”. If you can remember, Google earaches used to have real time news results from Google.
But Google too came out with an innocent statement maintaining that Twitter brought the misfortune on themselves. According to Google, Twitter made the biggest mistake by refusing to renew their agreement with Google.
“We are a bit surprised by Twitter’s comments, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer,” read a post on Google’s “Since then we have observed their rel=nofollow instructions.”
Rel=nofollow is code that prevents search engines from following links.
Google’s agreement with Twitter gave the search engine access to public tweets. The agreement expired in July last year and was not renewed. Now Google is implying it was Twitter that chose not to renew the deal.
As it turns out, some people are blaming Twitter for making its breaking news hard to find by the Search Engines since they decided to use the rel=nofollowwich also made it difficult for Google to include Tweets in its results.
According to Google, Twitter or Facebook have never written to them asking to be included in Search results. In an interview Danny Sullivan said he thought Google had enough permission to include links from networks like Twitter in its search results, but Google’s Schmidt said: “That’s your opinion. If you could arrange a letter from Facebook and Twitter to us, that would be helpful.”
Competition
A lot of people view Google’s pushing of Google+ in search results to be anticompetitive. Some disagree.
One point that has been brought up repeatedly is that Google could be recommending public profiles from Twitter and Facebook alongside its Google+ recommendations. Sure, they could.
Facebook and Twitter don’t grant access to Google for all of the stuff that would improve the personalization experience. Danny Sullivan was able to get Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt to talk a little about this.