Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, which launched last month, has begun trying to get a leg up in the real-time search wars by adding Twitter messages to search results.
Unfortunately Bing will not be crawling every tweet that runs through Twitter. Instead, it will focus on only those from people it deems important based on follower counts and volume of tweets. As they note:
We’re not indexing all of Twitter at this time… just a small set of prominent and prolific Twitterers to start. We picked a few thousand people to start, based primarily on their follower count and volume of tweets. We think this is an interesting first step toward using Twitter’s public API to surface Tweets in people search. We’d love to hear your feedback as we think through future possibilities in real time search.
Bing will now display results for certain celebrities such as Al Gore, a former American vice-president, who has approximately 1.2 million followers and American TV presenter, Ryan Seacrest, who has near 1.6 million followers, are two examples of Bing’s chosen ‘tweeters’.
Twitter results on Bing will show up separately from the main body of search results and only when users add the words “Twitter”, “tweet” or an “@” symbol beside the name of the person they are searching for. The results will include the person’s latest tweets and a link to “see more tweets” from that individual.
Firefox users can add Twitter search results to Bing and Google using Greasemonkey. It’s just a basic results of the top five for any query and not very satisfiying.
A real-time search engine has yet to capture the marketplace, but Twitter and Microsoft and Google all seem to be working furiously to bring this to users.
Bing’s limited addition of Twitter results to a search query will keep the buzz alive, and things at the Googlplex may be a little dismayed.
