It’s unclear whether Google would be launching the service independent of Twitter. The two companies have been rumored to be in discussions about some sort of search partnership—and Google CEO Eric Schmidt has talked about how ads could be attached to services like Twitter—something that he said Google would be “very happy to pursue with them.” If Google did launch its service independent of Twitter, it’s easy to see how users could swoop to the Google version, rather than Twitter’s own search service, which is riddled with problems. A Twitter executive said last month that the company was planning to bulk up its own search function but nothing has been said about those plans since. Reached for comment Sunday, a Google spokesman said, “While we don’t have anything to announce today, real-time information is important, and we’re looking at different ways to use this information to make Google more useful to our users.”