Twitter signs deals with Microsoft & Google

As the popular “micro-blogging” service Twitter continues to grow its user base at a rapid rate, the main search engines have now recognised the need to provide “real time” search results from this service. During October both Bing and Google announced new ways of providing their users with access to the information being posted on Twitter.

On October 21st Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, announced that it had made a deal with Twitter to include their “Tweets” in its search results and released its “Bing Twitter” search engine. That same day, Google announced that its inclusion of the real time messages into its index would be coming out soon, although there was a feeling that this announcement was rushed out as plans for Google’s own “Twitter search engine” or some form of more general real time search engine were less specific.

Microsoft’s version of Bing Twitter is only currently available when the searchable locale is set to the US, but undoubtedly more international versions will be available soon. There is also a slight delay in displaying the “Tweets”, which are 2 minutes old on Bing, when compared to Twitter’s own search facility that displays them within 30 seconds. This, according to Microsoft, is due to “trying to remove duplicates, filter out adult content and do some other processing”, the speed of which it hopes to improve shortly, as the Beta version has only just begun to run live.

This acknowledgement by the two prominent search engine companies of the importance of this more up-to-date socially-based information being made available to users will provide a great leap forward in the mainstream awareness and demand for fresh searchable networking information on the Internet. Although Microsoft and Google are both coming slightly late to real-time Twitter search – as there are already companies such as OneRiot, Crowdeye and Collecta that provide feeds from Twitter, as well as a Firefox plugin that displays Twitter results above Google’s main results ‘ it is a notable move and one that may add more functionality to a search of this type of information.

Also at the end of October, Google announced that “Google Social Search” would be coming soon. This service was in development before the Twitter deal was announced and is unrelated, as social search provides ‘trusted’ search results, which is only applicable to users who are logged in via their Google account. When a user searches, Google will identify the people you trust, then ensures that you see relevant content from them showing up in your search results, such as reviews or other comments.

Back at Bing, their “Social Search Team” have also indicated that there will be a Bing powered Facebook search engine soon also, which is likely to be incorporated with the Twitter one, into an all-encompassing social-search engine. It seems that both of these search engines are now competing to trump each other with new services and announcements, which can only be a good thing for the web user!

To find out more about the new Twitter Search and Social Search tools from Google and Bing ‘ and what they could mean for your business ‘ please contact us now.

Leave a Reply