Here is something exciting we launched last night: for breaking news topics, search users will see a module on top of the page which combines official news sources, photos, videos, and tweets. This is probably the most visible and useful integration of Twitter content in a major search engine until now, but I may be biased :)

The new module looks like this:

See the tabs on top of the page right below the search box?

Here is what it looks like when you click the Twitter tab:

Here you see a couple of relevant tweets and a couple of related videos shared recently on Twitter.

How does this work? To decide to show this news experience in the first place, we use an algorithm to identify hot spiking queries. When it comes to selecting which tweets to show, we use a ranking algorithm which takes into account not only how recent the tweet is, but also how popular the author is, URL link that may be shared in the tweet, linguistic analysis, and some other secret sauce. The algorithms are not perfect, but they seem to work reasonably well and we are always looking for ways to improve them.

I want to thank the team that worked on this, and especially Gilad, Nitzan, and Shiv, without whom this would not have been possible.

Stay tuned for more interesting search product launches along these lines in the future!