Twitter - Why should Google buy it?

So, some of the digerati are talking about the "real-time-search" capabilities of twitter. Forgive me, but what real-time-search?

Does the fact that some Ajax puts up extra search results in the stream count as real-time-search? Does searching across twitter's database count as "real-time-search"? Nope. Almost every site, including Funadvice does that. We can show you questions you asked 30 seconds ago in the search engine.

So why should Google, buy Twitter? Simple: an advertising opportunity. Google shelved Jaiku because it was not getting any traction. If google put a link unit in the right column of Twitter, then they stand to make a lot of money, and they can keep it free, forever. It's also a prestige acquisition. It stands to make a lot of money, maybe more than YouTube because its text driven, not video driven. Google can target ads a lot more successfully that way.

And yes, the content of Twitter could be extracted into another "tab" for google search -- "People talking about xxxx now", thus growing twitter exponentially, and more ad revenues.

So for all those blog posts talking about Twitter's real-time-search capability as if it were the be-all-and-end-all of Twitter, thats just a load of crap. It's just a search engine people. That's all. A search engine that looks for everything posted on twitter. With the results sorted not by relevance, but by recency, then relevance. Jeez!