Redmond, Washington — Software maker Microsoft’s Bing on Wednesday announced that it has started rolling out a new feature called Social Search, designed to make real-time Twitter feeds an inherent part of the searching experiences of the Microsoft decision engine, in a way that slightly resembles Google’s real-time search feature.
Twitter and Bing combination is not exactly new. Last summer, Bing began including tweets from certain people in some searches, though it was anything but real-time. Later in the fall, Bing announced a deal with Twitter giving Bing access to tweets.
Now Bing has established Bing.com/twitter, where users could look-for real-time Twitter feeds from Bing, this latest addition delivers the most applicable updates within seconds of a current news broadcast, which Lawrence Kim, from the Bing Social Search team, notes that new features are currently being test-driven by a select pool of customers, and that plans are already in motion to roll out the new additions to Bing soon.
Microsoft has already been tapping Twitter for what it describes as real-time data, and the Redmond company is merely expanding on the work already done to embrace tweets, and offer them alongside traditional Bing results. Users stand to benefit from not only being served additional data, but also having access to real-time information, without the lag added by the filter of traditional media.
From people on the ground tweeting about what is taking place around them to users sharing interesting news links while browsing at home, the Twitterati can be especially faster than traditional media outlets in picking up information on current events. Further, the Twitterati also culls up information that the traditional media outlets often ignore – such as the latest viral video being shared online.
“At Bing, we analyze what topics are generating the most interest on Twitter to bring you the latest and most interesting content,” Kim states. One of the features presently being examined involves the introduction of Social Results for queries, namely the inclusion of tweets. At the same time, another feature for which Twitter was picked up as a data source is designed to produce a list with the most popular shared links for navigational queries.
The feature should be available to most Bing users “very soon” according to Kim. Furthermore, to hilp fill out your standard searches, Bing will also keep an eye on trending topics and fold in tweets on those topics from Twitter within your search results. This will help you keep your finger on the pulse of the Internet.
It is not really surprising that earlier Google and now Bing have embarked on to make social media a part of their search strategy. The commitment from Microsoft is that Bing has been optimized to index and return real-time content from Twitter in the results in a matter of seconds after the tweets have been published.