Microsoft unveiled a new feature for their bing search engine- twitter search. It is located at bing.com/twitter and is already live. According to Microsoft this is a major step toward a search that relies on real-time data as opposed to archived links. The popularity of the tweeter will also have an impact on the ranking results.
Google quickly followed Microsoft (you don’t hear that often!) and announced their own real-time twitter search later in the day.
The ability to search in real-time is a panacea for search engine companies and I can see where integrating an extremely popular social media stream could provide a competitive edge but I could also see it cluttering up the search results.
From a marketing perspective I think it could provide a great opportunity for a social media savvy company to promote themselves or their products. Since the search engines have built in RSS capabilities, this will also prove very competitive – as companies are able to respond and react to real-time tweets! You should be creating a ton of alerts on competition, industry and companies as soon as the results go live.
Why not include the twitter results in the results from regular search? If I have to go to a separate search engine to search for twitter results why not just search twitter using tweetdeck, seesmic or some other desktop client? Thoughts?
Having used Twitter's search, It will be really interesting to see what tools come off of releasing this information to search engines where people can build third party applications from them.
I think the most interesting thing to look out for here is that real-time search results will be ranked based on authority (retweets and # of followers), this will put a lot of pressure on businesses to become active participants in dialogue.
Broadcasting messages to twitter is going to become an irrelevant practice. Influencing people, having your content retweeted, people adding your to their 'lists' or #FF is where all the power resides.
The term 'be relevant right now' is the new mantra on the web.
"Sorry!
Bing Twitter Search is not available in this locale.
If you wish to access Bing Twitter Search, change your locale to United States."
GAAGH!