Mountain View, California — Diverting a wholehearted attention to its recently unveiled social media network, Google+, the search engine giant Google has temporarily disabled its once-acclaimed Realtime Search function, which gave results that included real-time updates from Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and a bevy of other social networking sites.
Apparently, Google has now pulled its powerful Realtime search product offline after a 2009 agreement to display up-to-the-minute Twitter results expired. Besides, it seems that Google is now attempting to figure out a way to work its own social networking baby, Google+, into that mix.
According to tweet on the @GoogleRealtime Twitter feed acknowledges the feature’s absence, which on early Monday morning (July 4) tweeted rather simply and cryptically: “We have temporarily disabled google.com/realtime. We are exploring how to incorporate Google+ into this functionality, so stay tuned.”According to an influential tech blog Mashable, quoted Search Engine Land, as saying that the Real-time option has disappeared from Google. The feature was devised to integrate real-time data from Twitter and other social-networking sites. The company began indexing real-time Twitter messages in its search results in 2009, but apparently that arrangement with the micro-blogging site has expired.
“Since October of 2009, we have had an agreement with Twitter to incorporate their updates in our search results through a special feed, and that agreement expired on July 2,” Google told Search Engine Land. “While we will not have access to this special feed from Twitter, information on Twitter that is publicly available to our crawlers will still be searchable and discoverable on Google. Our vision is to have google.com/realtime include Google+ information along with other real-time data from a variety of sources.”
Amazingly, an unexpected casualty of these reform occurred when the feature’s URL leads to a 404 error page, and the option is missing from Google’s left-hand toolbar. And tweet results no longer appear under recent News query results.
So far, it is not yet evident if Google is negotiating with Twitter on an extension to the original agreement, although a reworked Google Realtime Search product is in the works. But alternatively, Google+, is of course, the Next Big Thing from the search engine behemoth as it is trying to quench its insatiable appetite for social media networking.
While Google+ is the chocolate factory’s new social networking product, which the company hopes will fare better than its earlier efforts like Google Buzz and Wave, keeping the company relevant in the age of Facebook and Twitter.
Google’s serious push into the social space places it directly at odds with the likes of Twitter and other social networking giants. If Google+ is truly gearing up for a fight with Twitter, it is no wonder the companies are not working together on this product any longer.