Last week, Google seach went live with real time updates directly from Twitter – Oh what a powerful added feature this is.  Meaning you can now very easily search a topic in Google and see up-to-the-minute relevent Twitter conversations and news in the search results.

Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products and User Experience wrote on the official Google Blog:

In the past few years, an entirely new type of data has emerged — real-time updates like those on Twitter have appeared not only as a way for people to communicate their thoughts and feelings, but also as an interesting source of data about what is happening right now in regard to a particular topic.

Google is absolutely the king of search [ranked no 1 by Alexa], but with Twitter added in to the mix, the benefits speak for themselves.

We personally most often hear breaking news via Twitter, usually way before the actual tv news – partly because we tend not to watch the news during the day – and partly because we spend more time online… On 5th of December, just a few days before the launch of the Twitter integration in Google, we heard on Facebook about the death of motivational speaker Jim Rohn. We Googled – with no results – went to twitter and found about 300 tweets on the subject. This was obviously up-to-the-minute breaking news which had not filtered very far at that stage. So now with Tweets live in Google Search the information we were after could have been found much quicker… Thumbs up Google & Twitter!

Here’s a quick video from Google showing exactly how the search now works:

So what do you think? Beneficial to all, or worried about the implications of more eyeballs on your tweets? If you don’t want to share your tweets publicly you could always protect your tweets, but remember this information was already available via the Twitter search anyway… It’s always up to you how you use Twitter : )