It’s not just Microsoft. Google and Twitter agreement reached.

We posted news earlier of Microsoft’s announcement to integrate Twitter search into its search engine Bing.

We, as many of you, were under the assumption this would be exclusively a Microsoft-Twitter agreement, giving the Redmond company a distinct advantage over its competitors, namely Google. We were all wrong and we’re back to square one…Google is in on the action too as Google’s Marissa Mayer announces:

“At Google, our goal is to create the most comprehensive, relevant and fast search in the world. In the past few years, an entirely new type of data has emerged — real-time updates like those on Twitter have appeared not only as a way for people to communicate their thoughts and feelings, but also as an interesting source of data about what is happening right now in regard to a particular topic.

Given this new type of information and its value to search, we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.”

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Twitter will provide Google and Bing access to Twitter’s entire archive of tweets (we only get to see a limited number of them as does the API) as well as unreserved access to real time tweets flowing in from across the globe. Both search engines will experiment with listing results ordered by best match, influence and of course time.

We should have really expected Twitter to be exploring other options, particularly with their own announcement of the big news stating “We hope more working relationships with organizations in the search business”.

Now this comes down to one thing. Who does it better?

(note: Bing’s version is already live. Google’s has yet to launch.)

Update: Twitter has also confirmed the news on its blog