Bing + Twitter Search Results Side-by-Side

Bing was the first of the big search engines to integrate Twitter into results, albeit, not in the most exciting of implementations. Today, Microsoft’s fledgling search tool is doing a bit more with Twitter, launching BingTweets, a separate site that combines Bing search with Twitter search and trending topics.

For example, search BingTweets for “All Star Game” and on one part of the page, the Bing search results will load, and next to them, recent tweets containing the same term. BingTweets also has a built-in option for tweeting the search result, as well as a “Trending Topics” box that extends beyond Twitter’s top ten to include currently popular topics, places, people, and products. 

While a nicely designed, potentially useful service, BingTweets is not exactly the type of real-time search integration that many see as the huge potential of leveraging data from Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites for better overall results. Rather, it’s designed to be another marketing channel for Bing, and in fact, was developed with Federated Media, who also launched the Microsoft-sponsored ExecTweets earlier this year.

 

It seems certain that there will be more from Bing in terms of Twitter integration in the future, however. The Bing team writes, “many people share their thoughts on Twitter, and search engines don’t currently do a great job of capturing that real-time content. We designed Bing to help you make faster, more informed decisions, and, since people often turn to real-time content to help them make decisions, BingTweets was a logical next step.”

The step beyond that would be actually integrating data from Twitter into Bing’s search results, as opposed to simply displaying results side-by-side on a separate landing page. The current implementation isn’t even a completely new idea – for example, this greasemonkey script shows Tweets in Google search results. Nonetheless, Bing’s willingness to experiment and try things that its competitors aren’t doing has paid off for the site so far, as Microsoft was the only major company to increase its search volume in June.

Source: http://mashable.com/2009/07/14/bingtweets-bing-twitter-search-results-side-by-side/