Huge news today at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco as Microsoft announced deals with micro-blogging service Twitter and social network leader Facebook to integrate their real-time feeds of updates into the Bing search engine. The Twitter feeds have already begun appearing in Bing search results as part of a beta program, while the deal with Facebook will take effect at an undisclosed point in the future.
The Bing Team said that the partnerships and integration are a second wave of innovation since launch of Bing about 100 days ago. The Microsoft team says they will apply Bing’s search technology to enhance the relevancy of the Twitter results that appear on its results page. They also mentioned that the quality of tweets - the posts issued by the service’s users - based on who is tweeting, the content of the message and other factors, such as whether other users are re-tweeting a message will influence the ranking in Bing. Additionally, spam and adult content will also be filtered to reduce spam and offensive results.
Screenshot of Bing and search result for Microsoft:
The growing importance of real-time search amid the exploding popularity of services like Twitter and Facebook has emerged as a potential growth area for Internet search giants, which expect real-time search to drive online advertising higher by allowing marketers to target relevant ads at consumers interested in breaking events and hot topics. Some proponents have argued real-time data and search could develop into a billion-dollar market. Okay, so now we can start to see how Twitter and Facebook are monetizing the rich data of the consumer conversations that their platforms hold.
