The lack of this has been a thorn in Google’s side for a while. In fact, it’s been a problem for any search engine.

As you’ll probably know, the huge success of Twitter has been built on a number of key foundations, including near-instant (short form) communication.

Quite recently, Bing tied-up a deal with Twitter. Guess what? Google wasn’t going to be far behind. Surprise, surprise: not.

Twitter’s tweets, an amazing feed of ‘live’, topical, content-rich data is going to be crucial to Google’s search results. Whether it’s the latest news, celebrity gossip or details of inter-planetary collision

From the Google blog:

“Given this new type of information and its value to search, we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.”

See more here for how relevance and real-time have hooked up – big time.

This kind of stole the thunder of Bing…

For Twitter, though, a site with massive usage but a, let’s say, ’stretched’ business plan, this is amazing news and a tribute to the founder Jack Dorsey and those who run the thing. It’s also great news for those CIOs of major businesses and others in many other areas of life who took a step off the precipice and decided to integrate Twitter functionality/interactivity into their own ventures, seeing it as much, much more than a passing fad.

Put the world’s best search engine together with a dynamic, fresh source of data from across the planet: sound like a potential success to anyone?