Let the battle to index Twitter begin.

Twitter, the microblogging platform that's quickly reshaping how the world thinks about communicating, announced this week in two separate blog posts (@google Nice and Bing Goes the Dynamite) that they've finished negotiating deals with both Microsoft and Google to index Twitter's massive body of status updates. It's going to be a monumental task for either Bing or Google - but whoever comes out on top stands to reap significant rewards in terms of gaining access to information in real-time, access that both search engines are currently sorely lacking.

Both Google and Bing are pretty good at picking up on new information, provided they know where to look. Problem is, neither Google nor Bing has the resources to scan every single page on the internet every single minute. They rely on internal ranking systems to decide which sites to give priority to, and the result is that there's a significant delay when new information pops up in unexpected places. For major news sites, Google and Bing know to keep close watch over new information, and news articles will show up on both search engines within just a few minutes. For less important sites, though, it can take hours, or even days, before either search engine figures out that they've stumbled onto something important - if at all.

That's where Twitter comes in. Twitter offers the ability to track events in literal real-time - in seconds, not minutes. When a US Airways flight made an emergency landing in the Hudson river earlier this year, the first people to produce photographs of the event did so via Twitter - they weren't reporters, and they didn't use normal channels of distribution to get the information out to the public. They used Twitter, and they used third-party Twitter photosharing applications like Twitpic to post the images of first responders rescuing the survivors from the water landing. All of that happened in seconds and minutes, not in hours, and Google and Bing didn't pick up on those Tweets at all until the media alerted the public.

With the new deals that Twitter has penned with Google and Bing, those search engines will now have access to those Tweets in real-time, not after the fact, and that promises to change both the way that Twitter status updates are indexed and the way that users go about searching for information on Twitter.

Up until now, when users wanted to search Tweets, the most effective way to do so was to use Twitter's built-in search engine, which they acquired from third-party developer Summize last year. Although that search engine is excellent at indexing Tweets, it's not perfect, and it has some significant drawbacks. When major topics like Michael Jackson's death trend on Twitter, Twitter's search engine can't keep track of all of them - there's just too many - and there is a limit to how long Twitter search results are indexed, both in terms of the amount of time since the tweet was made and in terms of the number of results. Therefore, it's all too easy for Tweets to simply "disappear" - although the tweets themselves still exist, there's no real way for people to discover them - ergo, they don't really exist.

With Google and Bing, two powerhouses of the search engine market, indexing Twitter's status updates, hopes that all tweets will live on in perpetuity have re-arisen - and indeed, there's no reason to believe that they wouldn't. Twitter survives by being lean; although they could keep all search results, forever, that would violate their principles of leanness and would cost them a lot of money and resources. Fortunately, Microsoft and Bing both don't give a whit about leanness - they have the money and the computing power to keep track of those tweets for as long as they want to.

Whichever company turns out to be better at indexing tweets is going to be sitting on the top of a goldmine of real-time information, and what they choose to do with that goldmine is going to significantly change how we go about searching for Twitter status updates in the future, and how that search engine goes about discovering new, important content. I wouldn't put any money on either contender just yet, though - always best to wait and see who's in the lead before backing a horse.