Twitter was accused yesterday of giving Google access to private user accounts, apparently including high-profile micro-bloggers such as former US president Bill Clinton.

Google has been able to crawl through Clinton's tweets and display them in search results, even though Clinton protected his accounts so that only chosen contacts could see his updates, according to a Los Angeles Times blog post.

However, it now appears that the Clinton tweets that Google displayed, which ranged from his thoughts on Hillary Clinton to John Edwards, have come from a fake Clinton account, appropriately named 'notbillclinton'.

Commentators have also said that the other protected accounts to which Google apparently had access were probably not protected when they were first cached by Google.

If Twitter had an agreement in place with Google that allows it to search through all of its tweets, the news would be significant because it would have shown favouritism to Google over its major search rival Microsoft.

Earlier this month it was reported that Twitter was in talks with Google and Microsoft about allowing the search companies to license feeds from the micro-blogging service.

Twitter could not be reached for comment at the time of writing.