Our 140-character tweets will appear more prominently on Google searches in coming months thanks to a deal reportedly signed between the search engine and Twitter.
Instead of crawling for data, as Google previously had to do, the search engine giant will now have access to Twitter’s firehose, basically a flow of data created by the microblogging company’s 284 million active users, according to sources cited by Bloomberg.
In layman’s terms, this means users will be able to view live tweets instead of Google’s current model of just showing the profile information.
Twitter also provides data to Yahoo! and Bing.
The deal reportedly does not include advertising revenue, but Bloomberg suggests Twitter will receive data-licensing revenue, which reached $41 million in the third quarter of 2014.
Engineers from both companies have reportedly already begun the process of designing the new search arrangement.
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo is trying to boost his company’s users to compete with more popular social-media sites like Facebook, with 1.4 billion users, and Instagram, which boasts 300 million users and is also owned by Facebook.
The company’s growth rate has clearly disappointed investors and stock has dipped from nearly $66 per share at this time last year to just over $40 today.
News of the deal comes as the Verge reports that Costolo worries Internet trolling is negatively impacting the company’s growth potential.
“It’s no secret and the rest of the world talks about [trolling] every day. We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day,” he said.
Twitter is set to report fourth-quarter earnings Thursday.
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