Bing brings out the tweets

Twitter messages from prominent writers like All Things D's Kara Swisher are now in Bing search results.

(Credit: Bing)

Microsoft is trying to get a leg up in the real-time search wars by adding Twitter messages to search results.

Bing will now surface results for certain celebrities (leading to the odd pairing of search guru Danny Sullivan and American Idol host Ryan Seacrest in the same sentence) when users search on their names and "twitter," the company announced Wednesday afternoon. It's not indexing all of Twitter, instead picking "a few thousand people to start" and using Twitter's public API to display those results in a special box among the other search results, such as stories that a person might have written about Twitter.

Amid all the nauseating Twitter adoration of late lies a real trend within the search community: the desire to display search results that contain items from real-time communication services. Right now, this is done haphazardly by the Big Three, although smaller companies are trying to offer this service for those who just can't wait.

Both Google and Yahoo, for example, will return the main Twitter page and a single tweet as the top two search results for "Ryan Seacrest Twitter." They don't call out multiple tweets within a single defined box, as Bing will now do with the new feature.

Bing's Twitter feature is rolling out slowly over the day on Wednesday.

[lonestarState]

Bing was beat at it's own game with combining Twitter results along with Bing results @ www.earthoid.com Earthoid.com had the feature 2 weeks ago if not longer.

[slecalvez]

Oh yeah and since verybody knows Earthoid.com... Who cares!

[ca5ter]

I sure hope someone comes up with an idea to run Tweets across my forehead.

[GKrynen]

LED or LCD display built into a cap fed via bluetooth from Twitter app on cellphone. Or bio chem tattoo with micro wire bluetooth feed from same cell phone right below your skin.

[solitare_pax]

So when will Bing add searches of Google and Yahoo?

[jessiethe3rd]

Bing... and cue the haters!

[Dan7637]

twitter is annoying and that "first decision engine" ***- thats the stupidest crap i ever heard

[sammydolla]

Dude I love Bing...its my default and I completely agree with you. The whole decision engine thing is meaningless to so many people...plus who wants a website to make decisions for them?

[peludeo]

I only bing now. It's great.

[eswinson]

I like twitter, I use it a lot, but I don't want a bunch of mindless tweets poisoning my search results.

[luc_vdv]

Wouldn't it have been a better idea to get regular searches right first?

As a developer, I found out long ago that the best way to find information related to a programming task in Microsoft's MSDN online documentation is through Google, and it's still the same today. The built-in search and Live Search (now aka Bing) are a waste of time.

Another example: in their current tour, U2 are using a giant round display manufatured by Barco. Just try the search string "barco u2": Google immediately gets it right, but all Bing comes up with is "news" about U2's previous tour in 2005 (where they also used a barco-manufactured display, but not the one I was looking for yesterday).

These examples aren't hand picked for the occasion, they're typical for the performance of Live Search and now Bing.

[chill75]

Both search engines returned proper results for me.

Bing: http://www.barco.com/events/en/pressreleases/show.asp?index=1490 (first result)

Google: http://www.barco.com/events/en/references/u2/ (first result)

[Police_States_of_America]

if we stop talking about it, it will go away. please no more bing stories, no one cares