Twitter has been identified as the next fighting ground for search engine supremacy, but has Bing jumped the gun and what does Google have up its sleeves?

Bing, Microsoft’s latest search engine, was launched last month to challenge Google and Yahoo in the search engine ratings war. It has to be said that Microsoft have done an excellent job, Bing offers its users a great service and it seems that although shrouded in a little controversy, Microsoft have improved their share of the marketplace.

Hot on the heels of their launch success, Microsoft is continuing to apply pressure to their competitors by being the first search engine to index “Real Time” Twitter Posts. Twitter posts offer an amazing source of real time opinion based information which will enrich and improve the relevance of a search engine’s results. But have Bing jumped the gun?
Bing is not indexing every Twitter post, only a selection of prominent celebrity Tweeters. Have Bing rushed the technology to market, offering only a partial solution?

Sean Suchter, general manager of Microsoft’s search technology centre, wrote on his blog: “Today we’re unveiling an initial foray into integrating more real time data into our search results, starting with some of the more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres.

“We think this is an interesting first step toward using Twitter’s public API to surface Tweets in people search.”

Prominent Tweeter like Ryan Seacrest, Al Gore and Guy Kawisaki are all indexed in the Bing search engine. Twitter results can be seen by using the keywords “Tweet”, “Twitter” or the @ symbol as part of a search query for the name of a twitter user. The results will include the user’s latest tweets (we have seen between 1 to 3 tweets being indexed so far per user) and a link to “see more tweets”. Currently this service is only working in the US version of Bing.
This all seems very impressive but Bing are not offering their users anything new, all of this information is available in Twitter itself and using Bing to search a partial database of twitter users will not offer users an accurate level of results. Search terms from within the Tweets are indexed within Bing, but a prolific Tweeter might Tweet 20+ times a day, which means that only a 1-3 of the users Tweets will appear indexed in Bing and only for short periods of time. We have not seen any evidence to contradict this.

Bing’s attempt to integrate Twitter content into its indexed search results seems to be more of a test than a usable new “Real Time” search facility. Let’s hope this was not a marketing and publicity exercise or just an attempt to beat Google. Bing needs to continue to develop this product, increase the number of indexed tweets and index the entire Twitter database in order to make this a viable addition to the search engine. It’s an exciting technology and it does seem a shame not to launch a fully working product.

Google have been reportedly in talks directly with Twitter and have shown a massive amount of interest in integrating Twitter directly into its search results. Not a lot of information has been released about Google’s current position which leads us to believe that something could be on the cards. We will just have to wait and see but let’s hope Google learn from Bing’s initial mistakes.

Article By Creative SEO UK