Similar rules apply for Facebook as well. This is why the deal between Google and Twitter was needed in the first place. Given that Twitter cancelled the deal and not Google, I don't see any other way for Google to get into social search other than beg Facebook and Twitter for access to their data again.
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I wonder if the author realizes that Twitter and Facebook ask the Google crawler not to crawl their data which conforms to the rules:
https://twitter.com/robots.txt Disallow: /search Disallow: /? Disallow: //with_friends
Similar rules apply for Facebook as well. This is why the deal between Google and Twitter was needed in the first place. Given that Twitter cancelled the deal and not Google, I don't see any other way for Google to get into social search other than beg Facebook and Twitter for access to their data again.