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Bing First To Search Live Twitter Streams

By October 22, 2009July 30th, 20233 Comments

At the recently held Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Qi Lu, the President of Microsoft’s Online Services Group, spoke to Tim Reilly of TechCrunch, about the new facilities soon to be launched on their new search engine Bing.

Qi Lu said that Microsoft was in talks with Twitter to introduce real time search on Bing.

The new features due to be Launched have been labeled ‘Bing Wave 2’.

He also provided a demo of what the new search results would look like. Apparently the new service will incorporate the best features of both Bing and Twitter.

Microsoft will now have access to all of Twitter’s public feeds, and so, when a user conducts a Twitter search on Bing, they will not only see the most recent tweets and top links, but they will also have the various search features of Bing. The most recent tweets of Twitter will be constantly updated in real-time on Bing. The results will also have a retweet button, so it will be very easy for users to forward the tweets if they wish to.

Although the financial details of the deal have not been disclosed, Qi Lu did admit that this would be a non-exclusive deal, thus fuelling the rumors that Twitter is in talks with Google for a similar deal.

Bing will be able to use Twitter content and will keep track of the number of followers to each tweet, in order to determine the quality and ranking of each tweet. Spam will of course be filtered. Tags will be used to identify the trending topics and Bing will also provide the shortened URL as well as the final URL of the topic.

There has been speculation about similar deals between Bing and Facebook but nothing
has been confirmed on that score as yet.