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.
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, online advertising, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple. E-mail Tom. 
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.
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)
- by Police_States_of_America July 2, 2009 8:55 PM PDT
- if we stop talking about it, it will go away. please no more bing stories, no one cares
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