Twitter and Bing continue their real-time search partnership

The romance between Twitter and Bing will continue. The two announced the renewal of their real-time search partnership, fittingly enough, via Twitter late yesterday.

Over the course of their back-and-forth tweets, Twitter and Bing reminisced about their past two years of working together and agreed to continue their partnership, alluding to “bigger and better things” to come.

Twitter and Microsoft first teamed up in 2009, making Bing the first major search engine to have access to Twitter’s “Firehose” of tweets. Google also partnered with the popular social media service, but talks of a reunion between Google and Twitter reportedly fell apart earlier this summer, bringing an end to Google Realtime Search.

Although the Twitter-Google partnership has been dissolved, Twitter believes its data is crucial to search, tweeting to Bing that “Search w/o Twitter = old news.” However, Google now has its own source of real-time social data — Google+. In response to the closing Google Realtime Search, a spokesman for the search giant stated:

“We’ve temporarily disabled google.com/realtime. We’re exploring how to incorporate our recently launched Google+ project into this functionality going forward, so stay tuned. Our vision is to have google.com/realtime include Google+ information along with other realtime data from a variety of sources.”

Google says it remains open to collaborating with Twitter in the future, but there has been no word of any new partnership between the two companies.

Meanwhile, Bing isn’t the only one with access to Twitter’s real-time stream of tweets. The company also has deals with Yahoo, NTT Docomo, and Yahoo Japan, as well as “dozens of other smaller developers.”