Google scraps Twitter real-time search feed in favour of Google+

Google has temporarily disabled its real-time search functionality and confirmed it will scrap Twitter updates when it's relaunched in favour of updates from its own recently launched Google+ social network.

Google confirmed that a deal it had in place with Twitter expired over the weekend, but noted that results from the social network will still be searchable.

"Since October 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 2 July," Google said in a statement to V3.co.uk.

"While we will not have access to this special feed from Twitter, information on Twitter that's publicly available to our crawlers will still be searchable and discoverable on Google."

The Google Realtime team confirmed that feeds from its Google+ services will be integrated in place of Twitter's, but no time frame was given.

"We've temporarily disabled google.com/realtime. We're exploring how to incorporate Google+ into this functionality, so stay tuned," said an @googlerealtime post.

Realtime Search feeds are taken from a number of services, including Google Buzz, Facebook, MySpace and FriendFeed but Twitter has been the main source of information.

The removal of Twitter is unsurprising, though, considering that Google is trying to become a major player in the social networking market.

Google+ was launched at the end of last week, but the service is not yet available to everyone as invitations have been restricted.

The service is viewed as a cross between Facebook and Twitter, and the integration with Google's other services such as Gmail and Docs makes it useful for businesses.

Facebook has promised an "awesome" announcement to counteract Google+, and speculation is rife that Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg will unveil Skype integration for the site.