Today at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Qi Lu, President of Microsoft's Online Services Division, announced a new beta feature that enables people to easily search Twitter's real-time information feed directly in Bing. This new feature helps people make better decisions and more fully understand Twitter conversations by collecting, analyzing and uniquely presenting real-time Twitter content.
According to Microsoft, the new Twitter developments in Bing include:
- A real-time index of the Tweets that match your search queries in results. This feature makes it easier to follow what's going on by reducing the amount of duplicates, spam, and adult content.
- Giving you the option to rank tweets either by most recent or by "best match," where Bing considers a Tweeter's popularity, interestingness of the tweet, and other indicators of quality and trustworthiness.
- Providing the top links shared on Twitter around your specific search query by showcasing a few of the most relevant tweets. Additionally, Bing automatically expands those small URLs to enable you to understand what people are tweeting about. Instead of showing standard search result captions, they select 2 top tweets to give users a glimpse of the sentiment around the shared link.
More info can be found on the Bing blog:
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. Innovative services like Twitter give us access to public opinion and thoughts in a way that has not before been possible. From important social and political issues to keeping friends up to date on the minute-by-minute of our daily lives, the web is getting more and more real time.
Search needs to keep up.
Today we announced that working with those clever birds over at Twitter, we now have access to the entire public Twitter feed and have a beta of Bing Twitter search for you to play with (in the US, for now). Try it out.