The internet caught fire last night as rumours from a Techcrunch story that Google planned to buy Twitter started a stream of denials from all sides. Twitter spokespeople admitted they were talking but wouldn’t say what about. The weather, we’re guessing.

Why would Google buy Twitter?

Twitter search. See, why Google is still the dominant search engine, it relies on bots to read pages and the bots are often fooled by clever spammers, requiring that Google maintain a team of maths and linguistics experts to put together better and better search algorithms. 

But Twitter’s search is based on the wisdom of crowds using the Tweets of Twitterists to see what’s happening on the net. It’s a massive source of raw data and Google has reason to be jealous.

Of course it is possible that Google won’t buy Twitter but instead will work out some kind of partnership that allows Google to have some kind of real-time search method using links and posts from Twitterists.

And although some say Twitter has no viable business model, that’s not likely to bother Google – it spent 1.6 billion to buy Youtube and that’s been a major loss in running costs. What matters to Google are eyeballs and market presence and buying Twitter would certainly get that.

Will we see Twitter integrated to gmail anytime soon?