Google has just updated its design to incorporate Google+ and the option to search in real-time has vanished.
Bloggers, journalists and digital marketers noticed quickly. That search option was the Google powered route to the latest buzz in the heart of web chat.
The rest of Google’s users may have noticed that the little scrolling box of commentary that sometimes appeared to accompany breaking news and conversations no longer did so.
The problem? Google’s deal with Twitter has expired.
The search engine, built by crawling and indexing content for free, had taken the unusual step of paying Twitter - a rumoured $15m or so - to have access to the social network’s ‘firehose’ of data.
The deal expired before the two digital platforms could agree on what the new rules and fees should be. It is not like Google to pay for data that it could crawl and index with its own resources.
This may have been one of the reasons that the renewed talks failed.
Twitter would have been aware that Google+ was launching (remember those rumours of ‘Google Circles’ launching during South by Southwest in March) and may not have been all that keen on lowering their prices for a growing competitor.
Google’s real-time search actually linked into more than a dozen different sources, including Facebook fan pages, FriendFeed and Quora.
It never was just a Twitter search extension. It shows just how important Twitter has become when its silence overpowers the noise from the other real-time players.
It is also worth noting that Google’s real-time integration into the main search results did not include every tweet on every topic.
The infamous algorithms were deployed to calculate when a query deserved a real-time enhancement and which tweets had enough authority to show.
The system worked. I missed real-time search when it was removed.
However, it took to make me realise how awful some search experiences were without it.
It took me minutes, rather than seconds, to associate the news with a credible source.
I had to go Twitter’s own search engine to find out where the news had come from. I had to search outside of Google and Google hates that.
Real-time search may return without Twitter and it will be Google+ that makes that possible; if we see a Twitterless real-time search from Google then it will mean two things.
Firstly, that Google+ has enough users and comments that it goes some way to replace Twitter - and the implications of that are significant.
Secondly, it will mean that Google is happy that its algorithms can determine author authority from Google+ accounts and comments.
This is where SEO and social media start to develop new opportunities.
A few days before the Google+ announcement, Google provided the hoops that site owners and authors can leap through in order to associate their content with their profile.
This works even if they were one of a dozen journalists working for a single magazine site.
With a bit of luck, the return of real-time search to Google will not inspire jargon like 'author optimisation' but what we may see is an even greater ability of well connected individuals to influence the masses through digital - and in real-time.
Andrew Girdwood, head of strategy at bigmouthmedia