Bing sings for Twitter

Posted on 2 Jul 2009 at 09:41

Microsoft’s new Bing search engine has begun displaying tweets from “prominent” Twitter users in its results.

The service is being trialled in the US and Sean Suchter, general manager of Microsoft’s Silicon Valley Search Technology Center, describes it as an “initial foray” into real-time search.

Bing has started indexing tweets from Twitter’s more “prominent and prolific” users so that if you search for their names in association with Twitter—Microsoft’s example search queries are “Kara Swisher Twitter”, “Kara Swisher Tweets” or “@karaswisher”—you’ll see their latest Tweets come up in real time on Bing’s search results.

Suchter said that the change is a response to the way Twitter has created a premium on immediacy of data.

“We’ve been watching this phenomenon with great interest, and listening carefully to what consumers really want in this space,” he wrote on the Bing blog.

“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.”

Author: Simon Aughton

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