San Francisco — Microsoft’s president of online services division, Qi Lu and senior vice president Yusuf Mehdi, took advantage of the Web 2.0 Summit here on Wednesday to announce two rumored alliances it has made with social networking sites Facebook and Twitter that will bring real-time tweets and social media status updates through its Bing search engine. Also, within hours of making it public by the US software giant, search engine titan Google too yesterday afternoon announced that it had signed an agreement to get a direct feed of Twitter’s torrents of micro-messages in real time search, in the latest sign of escalating competition between the two search engines.
At first glance it seems like a bit of a coup as the long-awaited deals are expected to ramp up the efficacy and lure of search results, by allowing users to scan real-time Tweets: 140-character stream-of-consciousness messages that Twitter hosts on its popular website. The consecutive announcements emphasized how real-time data in search results is shaping up to be a pivotal battleground in the search arena.
(Credit: Bing)
The Twitter partnership, which has been in under process for several weeks to index real-time tweets to Bing matching search queries in results. The Twitter feature on Bing, went live in beta on Wednesday at Bing.com/twitter. Also, the Facebook deal, which will access all information shared publicly on the social network, will arrive “at a later date,” Mehdi said. It is all part of Bing’s strategy to harness “the emerging hot area of real-time information,” he added.
Microsoft will offer a choice to rank tweets either by the most recent or by the best match, where Bing takes into consideration a tweeter’s popularity, content of the tweet, and other indicators of quality and “trustworthiness.”
As Microsoft holds a stake in Facebook, and there were rumors flowing around earlier this year that Google was considering buying Twitter. But, according to current reports at this time the deals do not provide any exclusivity or prevent Google from reaching similar agreements as well.
Microsoft’s Mehdi unveiled the deal with Twitter and offered an on-stage demonstration of the newly-launched product at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco Wednesday morning.
“We are going to get access to all of the public Twitter information in real time,” Mehdi said, adding the Facebook status feed will be introduced at a later date.
“We are giving Bing a feed of data made open to everyone,” Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg said at the summit.
Neither Microsoft nor Facebook elaborated when Bing would begin delivering status updates from the Palo Alto, California-based social networking service.
The ‘top links’ feature in Bing’s Twitter search. (Credit: Bing)
“This is just a start,” said Lu. Google and Microsoft each declined to discuss financial terms of the deals.
Asked about the announcement, Google Vice President of Search Products Marissa Mayer said, “We have a deal with Twitter.” Deals between fast-growing companies like Google and Twitter take a long time to come together, she added.
“This is not something that happens on the scale of hours, it is something that happens on the scale of months,” she said. “We will be featuring tweets in our search results as well as building a real-time search.” Google’s addition of Twitter data will fill a “critical gap.”
“Whenever there is new data that is appearing, and increasing as fast as we are seeing with Twitter, it is really about making sure that we have the content so we can search for it and find it for our users.”
“We look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months,” Mayer said. “Similarly, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you will find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.”
The Microsoft–Facebook deal includes only messages that its 300 million-plus users have flagged as viewable to the public, a practice that is relatively new and not as widespread on the social network, where users typically send messages to groups of friends.
Facebook’s Sandberg said no money exchanged hands in the deal between Facebook and Microsoft, during a separate presentation at the conference.
“As searchers are looking for more and more real-time Web results, we think this partnership will help Bing to improve its user experience,” said JP Morgan analyst Imran Khan in a note to investors.
This short video demonstrate by Microsoft’s Mehdi offers an instant glimpse of the service:
As for Yahoo, by virtue of its freshly-inked deal with Microsoft’s Bing, Yahoo also expects to be able to get benefit from the social networking alliances as well. Yahoo is in essence conceding indexing the Web and providing the backend search engine capabilities to Bing, and focusing on ads and other front-end Web portal type projects. Since Yahoo relies on the Bing search engine Yahoo searches should include any real-time search results from Facebook and Twitter on its Web pages, Yahoo! chief technology officer Aristotle Balogh, quoted as saying at the summit.
“Whatever they get, we get,” Balogh said, referring to Bing being relied on to deliver search results to Yahoo! Websites.
Effectively searching real-time commentary has been “an elusive goal,” Paul Yiu of the Bing social search team said in a blog post detailing the search engine’s Twitter search feature.
“Twitter is producing millions of tweets every minute on every subject you can imagine,” Yiu said. “Search needs to keep up.”