Google temporarily disables realtime search

WASHINGTON—Google has temporarily disabled its Realtime Search feature following the expiration of a deal with Twitter.

“Since October of 2009, we have had an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results through a special feed, and that agreement expired on July 2,” a Google spokesman said in a statement.

“Twitter has been a valuable partner for nearly two years, and we remain open to exploring other collaborations in the future,” the spokesman added.

Google said that while it no longer has access to a special feed of tweets from Twitter, “information on Twitter that’s publicly available to our crawlers will still be searchable and discoverable on Google.”

The Mountain View, California-based Internet search giant announced it was temporarily halting real-time search results in a Monday message on its @googlerealtime Twitter feed.

“We’ve temporarily disabled google.com/realtime,” it said. “We’re exploring how to incorporate Google+ into this functionality, so stay tuned.”

The Google spokesman said Google’s “vision is to have google.com/realtime include Google+ information along with other real-time data from a variety of sources.”

Google launched Google+, its long-awaited social networking initiative, last week. Google+ is currently available by invitation only.

Google+ allows users to separate online friends and family into different “Circles” and to share information only with members of a particular circle.

According to technology blog SearchEngineLand.com, which first reported the disappearance of Google Realtime Search, Google used a number of other sources for real-time updates besides Twitter messages.

They included Google News links, MySpace updates, Facebook fan page updates and results from user-generated question and answer site Quora.

Twitter continues to provide its real-time stream of tweets to Bing, Microsoft’s rival search engine.