by Search Copywriter
Y. Sulaiman
Y. Sulaiman
Just a day after anti-internet maven Andrew Keen surmised in the Telegraph that "Google's glory years may lie in the past", Microsoft's has announced that its new - and increasingly lauded - search engine Bing will include real-time results from Twitter. In a Bing Community blog post yesterday, Sean Suchter - general manager at the company's Search Technology Centre in Silicon Valley - announced that the search tool had begun indexing tweets from "prominent and prolific Twitterers". Examples cited include public figures like American Idol presenter Ryan Seacrest and politician turned environmental campaigner Al Gore, as well as major online industry figures like SearchEngineLand.com editor Danny Sullivan and Wall Street Journal tech columnist Kara Swisher.
To see these results, users simply need to type in the name of the figure they're searching for, followed by "twitter", "tweets" or even "@twitterusername" - for example, "@danny sullivan" or "ryan seacrest twitter".
A few celebrities have been included too, with Bing seemingly getting round the problem of fake celebrity twitter accounts by only including results from stars who are widely known to tweet themselves. For instance, tweets from Ashton Kutcher - supposedly the first person to have more than one million twitter followers - are included in a search for "@aplusk", but one for "Britney Spears twitter" but does do the same.
Suchter said: "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."
The feature is so far only available for users in the US (though users in other countries can change their settings to see US results). But it marks a major coup for the search engine, whose inventive features - such as letting users play 30 second video snippets within search results - are being increasing regarded favourably in comparison to Google's search offering.
Search industry pundits have been questioning for months now whether Twitter results will be featured in Google SERPS, to no avail. Although the recent introduction of Search Options means that Google users can filter results to only the most recent, this doesn't provide quite the same immediacy of information as real-time results from Twitter. And while Mountain View cites issues of spam and irrelevancy as its main reason for not including tweets, Bing's approach shows that it can be done - however tentatively - successfully.
Recent figures from StatCounter show Bing gaining on Yahoo! in search engine market share for the US in June, with Microsoft sites (including Bing, MSN Search and Live Search) rising from 7.81 to 8.23 per cent. Similarly, Hitwise statistics are indicating that traffic to Twitter has increased 22 fold over the last 12 months, with 93 per cent of growth happening in 2009 alone and taking the site from the 969th most visited site on the web in 2008 to the 38th most popular today.
With the micro-blogging site enjoying such a phenomenal rate of expansion, and Bing having nowhere to go but up, it makes sense that this enhancement will drive people towards the Microsoft search engine in the near future, and in the long-term if it develops the inclusion of tweets in its search results further. It only remains to be seen how Google will counter any move Bing may make in order to retain its increasingly unstable-looking search crown.
