Twitter and Google team up, so tweets now go straight into Google search results

Tweets are now going straight into Google, so that they will show up as huge boxes in search results.

The companies hope that the agreement will allow for real time updates to be fed into Google's results, meaning that a search for a topic or hashtag will show new and trending updates alongside the usual lists of websites and news articles. For Twitter, it could increase the importance of the site to those who don't use it — potentially bringing new users to register, as growth has stagnated.

Clicking on the results on Google takes users through to Twitter, where they can see the tweet in its context as well as exploring the rest of the topic.

A tie-up between Twitter and Google now means that tweets are being fed straight into Google as they are posted, meaning that Google doesn't have to send robots out to crawl over tweets and index them in its data. Instead, Google has been given access to Twitter's "firehose" — the constant stream of tweets that it had access to before, until Twitter turned it off.

In a blog announcing the change, Google said that the update is "a great way to get real-time info when something is happening". "And it’s another way for organizations and people on Twitter to reach a global audience at the most relevant moments," wrote Ardan Arac, a Google senior project manager.