Twitter has signed a major deal with Google

A recent deal between Google and Twitter has opened the social network’s 140-character posts to a much, much larger audience by including them into Google Search results. By granting Google access the the vast amounts of data that its users generate, Twitter has ensured that all of its tweets will appear on Google Search results starting sometime within the next few months. 

Twitter Inc. has struck a deal with Google Inc. to make its 140-character updates more searchable online. In the first half of this year, tweets will start to be visible in Google’s search results as soon as they’re posted, thanks to a deal giving the Web company access to Twitter’s firehose, the stream of data generated by the microblogging service’s 284 million users, people with knowledge of the matter said Wednesday. Google previously had to crawl Twitter’s site for the information, which will now come automatically from Twitter. The agreement underscores the progress that Twitter Chief Executive Officer Dick Costolo is making in getting tweets seen by more non-users and generating more advertising revenue from a larger audience. Twitter, which also provides data to Microsoft Corp.’s Bing search service and Yahoo! Inc., is aiming to draw more people to its site as user growth slows. Twitter this week announced deals to show advertising in Flipboard Inc.’s mobile application and with Yahoo Japan Corp.