Microsoft, Google using Tweets

Microsoft unveiled its real-time Twitter search feature at a Web 2.0 Summit and said it also planned to incorporate status updates from social network Facebook into Bing.

Within hours of the announcement by the US software giant, search leader Google said it too had reached an agreement with the popular microblogging service to include Twitter updates in search results.

The Twitter feature on Bing is already active and can be accessed at bing.com/twitter while Google, in a blog post, said it would roll out its product "in the coming months."

Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft's online services group, demonstrated Bing's Twitter search feature on stage at the Web 2.0 Summit.

"We are bringing the best of real-time right inside search results," Mehdi said. "We are going to get access to all of the public Twitter information in real time."

The Facebook status feed will be introduced at a later date, he said.

"This is just a start," said Qi Lu, president of Microsoft's online services group. He declined to discuss financial terms of the deals with Twitter and Facebook.

Due to a freshly inked deal with Microsoft, Yahoo! also expects to be able to deliver Twitter and Facebook updates on its web pages, Yahoo! chief technology officer Aristotle Balogh said 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."

Bing engineers began collaborating with Twitter shortly after Microsoft launched its new search engine about five months ago.

"You can now search for what people are saying all over the web about breaking news topics, your favourite celebrity, hometown sports team, and anything else you use Twitter to stay on top of today," Yiu said.

Bing's Twitter search delivers lists of "tweets" related to topics typed into a search box.

It ranks tweets by relevance, taking into account factors such as the author, content, and how many times comments are "re-tweeted" by others.

If someone has legions of followers, their tweets may get higher ranking. However, if particular tweets simply echo other microblogged comments they sink in the rankings.

Bing searches can also be done by the "hashtags" used to group Twitter messages.

Protected or deleted tweets do not get presented in Bing search results, which will keep comments indexed for no more than seven days, according to Yiu.

Facebook status messages intended to be public, instead of just viewed by friends, are expected to be integrated into Bing.

Twitter and Facebook search features promise to be a boost for Bing, which has made steady if unspectacular progress in a bid to wrest a bigger share of the lucrative search and advertising market away from Google.

Bing increased its share of the US search market to 9.4% in September from 9.3% in August, according to online tracking firm comScore.

It was the fourth month in a row of modest gains for Bing, which the Redmond, Washington-based software giant unveiled in late May accompanied by a US$100-million advertising campaign.

Google, meanwhile, increased its share of the US search market to 64.9% in September from 64.6% in August, comScore said.

Yahoo! saw its market share fall half-a-point to 18.8% in September.

Source: AFP

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