Remember Realtime Search? If you have been using Google Search regularly then you must have seen snippets showing tweets (updating in real time) from twitter related to your search keywords right inside the Google search results page. Well, these real time results came not only from Twitter as a source but included others such as updates from public Facebook pages, Google Blog Search, Quora, etc.

Well, now it looks like Google no more wants to show it's users related results from these sources and instead wants to somehow integrate updates from Google Plus into realtime search. However, as of now this realtime search feature has been totally disabled and the results page at google.com/realtime now throws a page not found error.

Google has also confirmed this via a tweet which says "We've temporarily disabled google.com/realtime. We're exploring how to incorporate Google+ into this functionality, so stay tuned". According to Google, they had signed an agreement with Twitter which allowed them to pull the tweets from Twitter and display them on Google's search results page.

Since this agreement has now expired and Twitter being the major source of content for Realtime Search, Google found it better to shut down the service. However, it is still not very clear so as to why this service expired as neither Twitter and nor Google have said much about this. Here is what Twitter and Google have told about Realtime search to Danny Sullivan of SEL.

Twitter

Since October 2009, Twitter has provided Google with the stream of public tweets for incorporation into their real-time search product and other uses. That agreement has now expired. We continue to provide this type of access to Microsoft, Yahoo!, NTT Docomo, Yahoo! Japan and dozens of other smaller developers. And, we work with Google in many other ways.

Google

Twitter has been a valuable partner for nearly two years, and we remain open to exploring other collaborations in the future.

We think Google has a reason to not renew this partnership (in case if it existed) because Google Plus is gradually catching up among users as a realtime discussion platform on the web and naturally it becomes very easy for Google to get real time discussions about various topics from their home grown Google+ rather than approaching a third party for the content of realtime search.

So, hold back till you see Real time search again with user updates in real time from Google Plus. Please note that Realtime search is different from Instant search as we are seeing users getting confused between the two.

References

Search Engine Land