As real-time search and Twitter’s growing importance in producing valuable information is getting into the mainstream, Bing is joining the likes of Facebook, Google and Twitter in bringing real-time search feature in their respective search algorithms. Starting today, Bing will be integrating more real-time data into its search results, beginning first with tweets of famous people – bloggers or celebrities.
While this may be a welcome development, this new feature is somewhat limiting though. To get the tweets of this “prominent” people, you will have to construct your search terms like – “Name Twitter” or “Name Tweets” or “@Name”, where name is the Twitter account of the person. The thing is how many famous people use their full name as their Twitter username? Or how many users do their search on web search engine just to get these people’s latest Tweets?
It would have been great if Bing (or the other search engines for that matter) will start indexing the Twitter stream and display Tweets along with the other web data that they crawl and display as search results. That’s more like a “real-time” search, right?
Anyway, this could be a good start though. As the Bing community blog explained via a post:
We’re not indexing all of Twitter at this time… just a small set of prominent and prolific Twitterers to start. We picked a few thousand people to start, based primarily on their follower count and volume of tweets. We think this is an interesting first step toward using Twitter’s public API to surface Tweets in people search. We’d love to hear your feedback as we think through future possibilities in real time search.
