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Last year, Google started integrated information from Twitter into their real time search results. They have now gone one step further – Promoted Tweets have started showing on Google latest search results pages.

Promoted Tweets are a form of advertising on Twitter, in which an advertiser pays Twitter to display tweets at the top of a Twitter search results page or even within a user’s tweet stream.

These ads will now also appear at the top of the relevant Google real time search results page – when a user filters searches to show only “Latest” results.  However, these ads or Promoted Tweets as they are called, will not show up on a regular Google search results page.

Google realtime search results showing Promoted Tweets

While this is the first time that Google has ever displayed ads from another network on their search results page, it may not be the last. According to Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land, who first blogged about these ads, Google has issued a statement saying, “Twitter is pioneering advertising against short-form content, so it was a natural starting place for us. We’re certainly open to continue exploring other advertising models and systems, including those we might develop in-house.”

The revenue generated by these ads will be split between Google and Twitter on a 50/50 basis, according to sources at Twitter.

Other Social Networks To Follow Suit?

If Google is true to its word and starts allowing ads from other networks, could we soon see more real time ads from Twitter, and then maybe Facebook ads and even promoted stories through Digg Ads?

While such initiatives would see a short-term increase in revenue by monetising products that previously weren’t monetised, they’re rather unlikely to really happen except in situations where Google AdWords has failed to monetise a service.

The appearance of Promoted Tweets on real time search results is probably a result of the original deal that Twitter forged with Google. When the deal was forged, Google was in a race against Microsoft to launch a real time search product. Twitter most likely used their favourable bargaining position to require Google to only show ads from Twitter alongside real time search results that were pulled from the social news site. The absence of regular AdWords ads on these pages, when compared to Google search results pages for all other time-range searches corroborates that this was the most likely scenario.

Twitter ads on real time search / AdWords ads on past 24 hours filter