In a new blog post, Twitter has confirmed what we have known all day: Bing and Twitter can be found in the same bed. In their own words:
“Twitter is providing Bing access to the overwhelming deluge of public, real-time tweets rushing in from all around the world so they can help you find those that make the most sense right now. While Twitter currently presents tweets based simply on timeliness, Bing is experimenting with new solutions such as “best match.” We hope more working relationships with organizations in the search business will mean even more variety for users.”
Of course this can only be viewed as the conclusion of a bidding war of sorts between Google and Microsoft over access to Twitter nearly endless flow of data.
The link to the Bing blog is at the moment broken, so we still have no official word from Microsoft, more as it comes.
UPDATE
The Bing blog post is back up. Bing will be indexing all of the incoming tweets, the whole public feed, and providing them to Bing seachers. It will look something like this in the wild:
You can then select to see a page that just covers the tweets on the topic, and then sort them. Bing will also be sorting the top link on Twitter around a certain topic, which looks something like this:
Bing outlines a few internal examples of how this all works, and what it has done so far in internal testing:
- Sean Suchter (my boss) and I avoided a closed freeway on a rainy Seattle day and made our flight home.
- Eric Scheel (principle program manager on the team) a photo-gear junkie, keeps up on early product reviews and owners’ tweets, which helped him decide on his next purchase.
- My wife thinks I am almost cool because I know stuff about Taylor Swift.
We will be bringing you a post as to what all of this means in the near future. For now, go over to Bing and give it a try!
Thanks to Flamarrion for the image.
I hope there will be an option in twitter to opt-out for this; I won’t give my feeds to Microsoft to become a more complete search engine than Google. If not, I’ll lock my twitter again. Everybody should. Kill Bing!
Integrating Tweets into search results is pointless.
Most -all- tweets contain pointless dribble.
They don’t provide any search value.
You can put a headline into 140 chars, but not a significant summary of anything.
If you type balloon boy in Bing, you will probably get 100 people saying they heard about the balloon boy news story (search value -100).
50 of these tweets will have a bity link to some news source. But you cannot see where these bitly links directly point to (search value – 75).
It would have been fucking great if Twitter would ‘auto expand’ these bitly links automatically.
This way you could see that the link was actually a CNN link.
Hell, it would take Twitter 1 year and another 100 million in funding to implement this feature. Maybe a feature suggestion for MS Bing Twitter.
The problem with Twitter is that you simply cannot put any significant information into 140 characters (search value -500).
Lets take the Iran protests as an example. You would type IRAN PROTESTS into Bing, and you would get a shitload of people saying that police are beating them up or that someone was shot.
A tragedy, YES. But does it actually provide search value? NO.
When you’re looking for a news item, you want the complete story. A real time feed is fragmented and is lacking in any significant detail. The short nature of Twitter also doesn’t allow you to get a complete picture of the story.
CONCLUSION
A blurb of 140 characters doesn’t provide any search value. MS wasted a shitload of money and Google says: Hey we can waste money as well as you can. So we’re to going to flush money down the drain on Twitter too.
Zoe Sands
This is great news for search having the ability to integrate real time twitter feeds directly in Bing and Google. It adds to an improved user experience for searchers to find the latest information immediately. As well as allowing brands to have the ability to get into the search results much quicker than traditional search engine optimisation (SEO) work. Potentially this is a great strategic move for Twitter to drive brand awareness and usage of its platform.
Oh come on.
Yeah, your comment is about 10 minutes behind. QED, you lose.