Bing, the new search engine project from Microsoft, has gotten a whirlwind of attention, in part because of its large marketing push which made the world aware of Bing across every major media channel. And while the debate still continues in regards to which search engine is better for what purposes between Bing and Google, Microsoft is continuing its efforts to make its new search engine productive.
Part of this continued effort appears to be BingTweets, a recently launched collaborative project teaming Microsoft with Federated Media and Twitter in order to combine real time Twitter search content with Bing search results. It’s not a far stretch from what Bing was already offering. With a montage of media and text search results, Bing was already fairly diverse in its search results formatting. And Twitter, being the popular microblogging tool that it is, has found itself at the center of the real time trend.
With two different options for search on BingTweets, you can merely include the Twitter timeline of a given search query to supplement your Bing search or simply do a search on Bing. BingTweets also displays trending Twitter topics, and has an option to tweet your search results or share them across the social web. What Microsoft is doing with this particular partnership is leveraging Twitter as a mainstay for accepted real time search results and serving it up to the public on a Bing platter. It’s effective and tolerated for the time being, seeing as there haven’t been many other ways in which to offer real time search results for much of anything.
That puts Twitter in a good position–a position which has been anticipated since early adopters slowly discovered the value of its service as an information distribution platform. Twitter not only mimics much of what is occurring on the web, but what is occurring in the physical realm of our lives. All that archived information is best used as an immediate gratification tool for up to date data.
Several search engines have jumped into the real time trend by simply adding Twitter search results to their existing service, including OneRiot. In turn, even OneRiot has found itself in a better position for future partnerships as a result.
Google attempted its own form of close-to-real time search results, still keeping them within the ranked parameters that Google has always substantiated. For this, Google turned to blogs, which was the sensible thing to do. But will the partnership with Microsoft and Twitter be able to beat Google? Probably not.
There’s still the issue of organizing real time data and parsing out into reasonable, reliable and useful bits of information. These stipulations change radically on an individual basis and are currently best regulated for business use, namely marketing and market research. That means it’s still up to each and every user to determine whether or not the real time Twitter search results are useful to them at all.
And you thought Bing was looking to minimize the noise on the web. Perhaps that’s why BingTweets operates from a separate website than the regular Bing site. Acting as a standalone Twitter app is a good approach for something that could become widely used or merely experimental for Microsoft.Have you been using Bing, and do you think Microsoft is making a good move by adding Twitter for its real time search engine?
