The official Google Blog had a “big” announcement yesterday:

10/21/2009 02:09:00 PM

“At Google, our goal is to create the most comprehensive, relevant and fast search in the world. In the past few years, an entirely new type of data has emerged — real-time updates like those on Twitter have appeared not only as a way for people to communicate their thoughts and feelings, but also as an interesting source of data about what is happening right now in regard to a particular topic.

Given this new type of information and its value to search, we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months.

This has been big news across the blogosphere today… unfortunately it provokes a “meh” response from me.

Why?

Because a simple plugin for IE or Firefox called WebMynd (that has been around for quite a while) already did this and much much more.

Webmynd – Search the Real Web

Webmynd rides hidden in your browser and allows you to do a number of super sweet features:

1.  It replaces the paid placement Google ads with results from sources that you choose including Twitter, Youtube, Wikipedia, Amazon, Scridb.com, and more.

2.  It keeps a record (yes – it’s erasable!) of your browsing history and categorizes it in multiple ways for easy revisiting later on.

3.  Customizable – by adding your own sites to searches you can find things that you never would have found before.  With a simple click you can search all, some or just your favorite sites for information.

4.  Share to multiple social networks from any site you visit – unfortunately at this time there is not a “trackable” link provided (i.e. Hootlet) but their engineers have assured me they’re working on this.

With all of this at your fingertips and an extremely lightweight interface riding over your existing browser, Google’s announcement of incorporating Twitter Tweets seems like a “too little too late” to me.  Download the plugin at www.webmynd.com and prepare to search in an entirely different way.