Microsoft Bings Twitter to Search

With Twitter’s foray into mainstream media there has been a urge for real-time search and urgency of delivering topical data. Google and Facebook are working out significant changes on their search tools to fillip status updates. In the meantime, tweets seem to be doing a better job in indexing the web. In a bid to offer real time search features Microsoft took the opportunity to add Twitter updates to its much-hyped search engine Bing. Currently the Twitter-related results are limited only to searches on prominent Twitterers themselves, not nearly all tweets.

The implementations seems more of a publicity than reality. Bing is showing up recent tweets from well-known people. The search appears only when that person’s name and Twitter in provided in the same query. This has been tweaked via Twitter’s API, which doesn’t differentiate it from a simple widget that shows you the most recent tweets of a twitter member.

The Bing team reasons this step in their blog:

Today we’re unveiling an initial foray into integrating more real time data into our search results, starting with some of the more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres. This includes Tweets from folks from our own search technology and business sphere like Danny Sullivan or Kara Swisher as well as those from spheres of more general consumer appeal like Al Gore or Ryan Seacrest.

Starting later today, when you search for these folks names in association with Twitter, you’ll see their latest Tweets come up in real time on Bing’s search results. For example, if you type “Kara Swisher Twitter” or “Kara Swisher Tweets” or even “@karaswisher” as your search query, you’ll see something like the below. (Note this feature will be rolling out gradually over the course of the next few hours so you may not see it right away.)

In case you are a bit geeky and using Firefox you can easily add Twitter in Bing and Google via software add-on. But, let me tell you it offers just the rudimentary - list of the five most recent Twitter search results for that particular query ensconced on top of the regular results.

The feature doesn’t seem to hold much appeal, after all, as most of famous people use their own name as their Twitter handle. Instead you can also Twitter’s existing search tool or Google search to find the Twitter.

However, the expert opinion suggests, Google, which does offer near-real-time results for some news-oriented queries would not wait long to add some kind of Twitter-related results in some way or the other. The bottomline reads that Bing’s Twitter results are what Google doesn’t offer. Although it doesn’t matter much but that’ll keep the recent positive hype about Bing intact. This is an important, buzz especially at a time, where a new study shows that Bing continues to grow slowly grabbing 1% of search market in June, where as the study shows Google lost a bit of market share during this month.