Twitter has signed deals with Microsoft and Google to allow search engine companies index searches of messages posted to the microblogging website.

Bing search engine became the first to let users search the deluge of tweets flowing across Twitter, along with similar status updates on Facebook, in real time.

Google, however, claimed that the quality of the search results, rather than speed of launching the service, would prove more important, particularly given the difficulty of finding relevant information among the mass of short messages on Twitter.