Microsoft has upgraded its Bing search engine with the addition of a live Twitter feed. According to Microsoft spokesperson Paul Yiu, the new service will allow users to locate specific Tweets in a user friendly, real time environment.
“Web indexes in search engines update at pretty amazing rates, given what it takes to crawl the entire web and index it for searching, but getting that to ‘real time’ has been challenging,” Yiu wrote in an official blog post.
“The explosive popularity of Twitter is the best example of this opportunity. Twitter is producing millions of tweets every minute on every subject you can imagine. The power of those tweets as a form of data that can be surfaced in search is enormous.”
Yiu explained that social networking services such as Twitter provide unique access to public opinion and thoughts – which US Bing users can now easily search through.
“If you want to keep an eye on [a specific] topic, you can just watch the Tweets roll in. Or, click on ‘See more Tweets about’ to go to a page full of Tweets. On that page, you can change the ordering to ‘Best Match,'” said Yiu. “If someone has a lot of followers, his/her Tweet may get ranked higher. If a tweet is exactly the same as other Tweets, it will get ranked lower.”
He added that Bing had also replaced traditional links with “social captions” to more accurately display Twitter chatter.
