Twitter in search deal with Google and Microsoft's Bing

Tweets to appear in search results, as Bing also announces Facebook search Twitter has sold the rights to search its vast store of real-time communications in twin deals with both Google and its search rival, Microsoft's Bing - with Bing also announcing that it would start searching Facebook status updates.The deals, which were announced within hours of each other as the search engine rivals played a game of one-upmanship, will see tweets from users whose updates are publicly viewable indexed by the search giants almost instantly. Until now, the only way to find tweets in real-time was through Twitter's own (occasionally unreliable) site search. The deals cement Twitter's position as one of the most important players in the online world. And while neither Microsoft nor Google has said how much it will be paying for the search rights, it also represents Twitter's first significant steps towards actually making money - an important milestone for a company that is valued at around $1billion, despite some uncertainty over what their business plan .Microsoft announced their deal first, with executive Qu Li telling a San Francisco technology conference that their search engine, Bing, would become the best way outside of Twitter's own website to find out what people were saying on Twitter. It was also announced that Bing would start incorporating Facebook status updates in its search. While Facebook's user base of 300 million worldwide is around six times larger than that of Twitter, Bing will only index updates from people whose statuses are shared with everybody; those with more restrictive privacy settings will remain uncatalogued. The deals looked like they would give Microsoft's recently relaunched search engine a huge competitive advantage over Google in the increasingly important field of real-time search - exactly the sort of thing Microsoft has been looking for as it tries to claw market share away from their bitter rivals. That lasted all of three hours.Refusing to be upstaged, Google revealed on its blog that its search engine has secured the tweeting rights, too. But while Google did a good job of stealing Microsoft's thunder with their announcement, they were clearly playing catch-up; within hours of the announcement, Bing had already got a functioning version of the search live on their site. Google, on the other hand, is not expected to have its Twitter search up and running for several weeks - possibly to coincide with the launch of its 'Social Search' feature, announced by Vice-President of Search Marissa Mayer yesterday, which will pull in information from the user's various social networks to return more relevant results. That is expected to be released in Google Labs, the company's website for experimental projects, within the next few weeks