Redmond, Washington — Microsoft is taking a shot into the hot new arena of real-time search. The Redmond, software company on Wednesday began adding some Twitter posts into Bing, the search engine it launched a month ago, gaining a bit of a leg up on competitors even though the capability is limited. For now, Microsoft is indexing a "few thousand people, based primarily on their follower count and volume of tweets," according to a blog post by Sean Suchter, general manager of Microsoft’s Silicon Valley Search Technology Center.
“There has been much discussion of real-time search and the premium on immediacy of data that has been created, primarily by Twitter,” wrote Suchter, on the company blog post about the feature. “We have been watching this phenomenon with great interest and listening carefully to what consumers really want in this space.” Today we are unveiling an initial foray into integrating more real time data into our search results, starting with some of the more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres.
Bing will now display Tweets for certain celebrities from folks from our own search technology and business sphere like search guru Danny Sullivan and American Idol host Ryan Seacrest or Kara Swisher when users search on their names and “twitter,” the company announced Wednesday afternoon.
Twitter messages from prominent writers like All Things D’s Kara Swisher are now in Bing search results. (Credit: Bing)
When users enter, for example, “Al Gore Twitter,” “Al Gore tweets” or “@algore” in the Bing search box, the top result will be the most recent Twitter updates from the former vice president. Bing will update the Twitter results every 60 seconds.
The company says it is not involve directly with Twitter to deliver the capability. “We think this is an interesting first step toward using Twitter’s public API to surface Tweets in people search,” wrote Suchter.
Microsoft developed it using public programming interfaces, or A.P.I.’s, that Twitter makes available to anyone. Although all major search engines index Twitter profiles and some older tweets, Bing is the first major search engine that is integrating with Twitter in this way. This could help Bing keep up the buzz it has generated in the past month.
Suchter said the feature will be rolling out gradually, so some users might not see the Twitter messages immediately.