Google, Bing search Twitter

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 22 October 2009 03:36

Your IT - Home IT

Microsoft's deal with Twitter to include public tweets in Bing searches has been closely followed by a similar arrangement between Google and Twitter.

Shortly after Microsoft made available a beta implementation of its Bing/Twitter integration, Google revealed that it too had an an agreement to include tweets in search results.

Microsoft's implementation provides a tag-cloud style display highlighting the hottest topics on Twitter, with the text size indicating the relative popularity.

While the Bing results are supposed to be real-time, they don't seem to be as up to the minute as Twitter's own popular topics list. At the time of writing, Twitter was highlighting the 'Kanye West dead" hoax that was the subject of large numbers of tweets, but that topic was nowhere to been seen in Bing's tweet cloud.

And in keeping with the beta status, specific Twitter searches using Bing resulted in the message "Twitter search results are currently unavailable."

As for Google, Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience said "we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months."

It appears that rather than providing a separate Twitter search facility, Google will include relevant tweets in general search results.

What other differences are there? Please read on.