The next ‘holy grail’ of search advertising?

Micro-blogging site Twitter is in advanced talks with Google and Microsoft about licensing its data feed to the companies’ search engines!

This is very exciting news for all those brands and advertisers that currently use Twitter to release information about upcoming products and company news.

I personally think this is a brilliant idea, and if you’ve ever used Twitter Search you’ll know why – it’s a great way to follow trends, get the news straight from the horse’s mouth and find out what people are saying about you.

The ability to cull through the flood of tweets as they are posted is gaining popularity as an important new way to search the internet for up-to-the-minute information on the latest news events and happenings on.

Twitter’s discussions with Microsoft and Google are being conducted separately and would allow each company to incorporate the 140-character messages, or ‘tweets’, that Twitter is known for into their internet search results.

The AllThingsDigital blog (part of the Wall Street Journal) quoted unidentified sources as saying the companies are discussing several types of deals.

Details could include Twitter receiving a payment of several million dollars and various types of revenue-sharing agreements to allow Twitter to benefit from the ad revenue that Microsoft and Google generate from search results.

Twitter has emerged as one of the fastest-growing internet social media services due to the amount of businesses that use it to promote themselves and stay in touch in ‘real time’, however the company has yet to generate any significant revenue from its free service. Could this be the micro-blogging site’s ‘holy grail’ of revenues?