To celebrate 10 years of Creator Weekly, I’m sharing tech highlights from 2015 that still resonate 10 years later. This update was for the week ending May 23, 2015.
Ten years ago,
Google added the Twitter firehose, posts from the real-time feed of Tweets, to the Google Search results. That
meant for breaking news events you could immediately find related Tweets in
Search.
Google had previously shown real-time Tweets starting in 2009. But in 2011
that deal expired, and Google said
they were working on adding Google+
to their real time search results.
Fast forward to 2015. Twitter
terminated agreements with third parties
to resell the firehose data and decided they would be making deals directly.
Google apparently was one of those direct deals.
The benefit for Google was getting up-to-the minute content in the search
results.
The
benefit for Twitter
was that people could find those Tweets, click, and then could be pushed to
create an account (if they didn't have one already).
Some people called this the end of the Google+ era in Search. This is foreshadowing.
If you search for information on a current event, you may see a
"What people are saying" shelf with posts from
Instagram, X, Facebook, Reddit or other social media.
Fast forward to 2022, when Elon Musk took over Twitter and started
implementing big changes.
In July 2023 Twitter started only displaying Tweets to signed-in users. Apparently Google dropped almost half of the Twitter links in its index with this change.
Some people called this the end of the Google+ era in Search. This is foreshadowing.
The view from 2025
If you search for information on a current event, you may see a
"What people are saying" shelf with posts from
Instagram, X, Facebook, Reddit or other social media.
In July 2023 Twitter started only displaying Tweets to signed-in users. Apparently Google dropped almost half of the Twitter links in its index with this change.
But the firehose of new Tweets was still there, even as older links were lost.
A few days later Twitter made changes to show the content to Google and
signed-out users to fix that.
There hasn't been any public word, but presumably X (formerly Twitter) finds
it beneficial to maintain this deal.
The Twitter (and X) posts are just one way Google has been trying to
highlight different points-of-view in the Search results. In 2022
Google also
launched a "Discussions and Forums" filter in the mobile search results, and in 2023
"Perspectives" (now called "Forums").
Today, if you search for recent events, Google may include a "What People are Saying" shelf. This can include fresh posts from X, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and other social platforms.
Today, if you search for recent events, Google may include a "What People are Saying" shelf. This can include fresh posts from X, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and other social platforms.
As
AI overviews take over the search results, the ability to find what actual people are saying is really important. I
don't want all the different perspectives blended and averaged. I want to see
different points of view, and who holds those perspectives.
So I think it's important that Google shows these real human posts, and not
just from a single social source.
References
Search Engine Land, 7 July 2011:
Google Realtime Search & The Aftermath of the Google-Twitter Split
Twitter Blog, 19 May 2015:
A new way to discover Tweets (Internet Archive)
Google Blog, 19 May 2015: Tweets take flight in the Google app (Internet Archive)
Google Blog, 19 May 2015: Tweets take flight in the Google app (Internet Archive)
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