Google shutters Realtime Search after Twitter deal expires

Twitter's deal with Google to include updates in Mountain View's search results ended on 2 July. As a result Google's Realtime Search function, which also provided feeds from Facebook fan page updates among other social network guff, went offline and is currently displaying a 404 error message. Search Engine Land got this …

[Oddbin]

hmmm

Anyone else think this is a bad move for Google?

[Chris 3]

Not really

I expect Google did some fairly hefty analysis to see how often it was used.

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds like it was Twitter's decision...

Perhaps Google+ is a step too far for the behemoth - if they get too cocky, they might be alienated by the rest of the kids in the playground.

[Tim 8]

Thank (insert your diety's name here)!

What utter crap that was anyway. I fiddled with blocking filters and noscript to get rid of it. It was pretty arrogant (surprise!) that there was no option to turn it off. (which would break anyway if you wisely flush your google cookie regularly.)

[Anonymous Coward]

The Sound of One Hand Flush

Ah - so that's why it never worked for me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't *completely* useless for me.

I actually used it a couple of times to useful effect - not least of which was determining the "Here you have" virus was not a targeted attack against one of the environments we managed.

I could have used it today to confirm an odd - but unconfirmed - story about a crazy sandstorm happening in Phoenix where I have a number of friends, coworkers, business contacts and employees. Google News search has one unrelated story from June (reference to an old movie called "Flight of the Phoenix"), but Twitter is buzzing about an "apocalyptic" sandstorm there... which tends to imply that there might be some truth to it.

Of course, those are pretty obscure use cases (i.e. what are people talking about *right now*) but still handy - IMHO - if used that way.