twitter-s1Twitter has already put together some sweet sports-related infographics utilizing the wealth of tweets it has about a certain game or event.

But now the social media giant is taking it one step further and embedding sports information data directly into search queries.

Twitter user @sdkstl noticed the feature Thursday night after she did a search for “Jason Collins” on her Twitter iOS app. Collins, who recently signed a 10-day contract for the New Jersey Nets, was playing in a game against the Denver Nuggets when the search query occurred.

Twitter spat out a small box labeled “Trending NBA,” which showed the score and time of the game (Nets were ahead 59-36 at halftime), and perhaps more interesting, the number of tweets about the game (14,800):

twittersports12

Others noticed the new feature this week as well:

https://twitter.com/Sarki_234/status/438854914823831554

https://twitter.com/king_chudy/status/438864075284434945

We’ve reached out to Twitter for more details about this and will update when we hear back.

Normally, when I want to know the score of a sporting event, I’ll either head to ESPN.com or do a Google search. But now that Twitter appears to be including box scores, I might think to use the app more for this purpose.

It’s also an extra bonus to view not only the game data, but also Twitter-related analysis. Perhaps Twitter will include even more sports-related information like this — for example, which team has more @mentions, or what players are people tweeting about the most?

Update, 10:20 a.m.

A Twitter spokesperson confirmed to us that this is a new feature and is part of the company’s experiment to allow users to find out about events and trends people are talking about on Twitter as they’re happening. Here’s how Twitter described it:

With this update, if you pull down on your home timeline to refresh it and there are no new Tweets to load, you may see recommended Tweets, trending topics and suggestions for new accounts to follow. In the U.S. only, you’ll see TV, sports (like what you saw) and news events updates as well.

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