Yesterday there has been a very confusing development with the Google real-time search results, in fact, it was not available.

As we received news Google has temporarily shut down this service, for how long, we don’t know yet. But as it seems it has a lot to do with the fact that their agreement with Twitter to display their results has expired.

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With the emphasis on social media over the past few years we all started searching for news using mostly social media like Twitter or Facebook. Yes, Google is still number one search engine with no signs that it is going to change, but lately there have been a few changes that may have gone under the radar but should not go any further unnoticed.

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The diagram below illustrates the steady decline in the use of word “twitter” in the English literature. It appears as though the word would have been nearly forgotten if it wasn’t for Twitter’s launch in 2006. Soon after that “twitter” becomes “Twitter” (or @twitter) and the first association is of a 140 character micro-blogging service, everything else has been shadowed by the new Internet phenomenon.

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While researching the history of the word “twitter” on the internet we tried using Google date range option to find out why there was a peak of mentions of “twitter” in 2004, two years before Twitter.com launch. The search query looked like this:

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=twitter&hl=en&tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:2004,cd_max:2004&prmd=ivnsu&ei=sL87Tab-BYiXcbm89IQH&start=0&sa=N

And results:

We’re pretty sure most or all of the above are in fact wrong but unsure why it happened.

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