Twitter is moaning about Google and its Google+ integration (TechCrunch). The gist: Google is (perhaps unfairly) shoving Google+ pages to the top of results lists, and Twitter feels that it’s being hindered, despite often being more relevant. Here’s Twitter’s statement:

For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet.

Often, they want to know more about world events and breaking news. Twitter has emerged as a vital source of this real-time information, with more than 100 million users sending 250 million Tweets every day on virtually every topic. As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant results.

We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.

Of course, Twitter missed out a few tiny scraps of information:

• Twitter had a search deal with Google whereupon Twitter results were prominently displayed as real-time results. This was terminated in July 2011. This presumably caused Twitter results in general to be lost from Google’s archives. (It was, depressingly, at one point far easier to search for an old tweet on Google than Twitter. Now, even more depressingly, you cannot easily get to old tweets at all.)
• For the Guardian, Charles Arthur notes that Twitter does not provide Google with “unlimited access” to content.
• Twitter links take on the rel attribute with a value of nofollow, which instructs “some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index” (Wikipedia).
• Twitter’s own search is a joke, and the company appears to have no interest in making it more powerful. It’s fine perhaps for accessing the very latest tweets from a trend, but if you want to search anything else—including your own posts—you are stuffed.
• Twitter appears to have absolutely no interest in scaling its archive (or no capability to do so). Vaguely remember a tweet that someone sent you a few weeks back? Good luck in finding it! Want to find an old DM? You’re better off checking your email than your Twitter client or the Twitter website.

I’m a big fan of Twitter—it’s the only social network that I care about to any degree. But I find it a bit rich that the company’s moaning about Google’s latest actions when deals have been terminated for real-time content, and when Twitter has zero interest in its own archives, even those that are quite recent. I’m certainly not thrilled about the prospect of Google+ results unfairly gaining prominence, given the service’s relatively weak usage stats, but if Twitter wants to gain ground, it should get its own ‘search house’ in order and also resurrect the deal that shoved latest tweets right in people’s faces every single time they got Google search results.