Google, Bing search Twitter

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 22 October 2009 03:36

Your IT - Home IT

Mayer also implied that tweets will be given more weight when they contain specific information: "the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favourite ski resort, you'll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information."

Bing's approach is to weight tweets according to various factors. Tweeters with many followers are likely to see higher rankings, as are messages that link to news stories or that are re-tweeted by lots of people. The re-tweets themselves will be marked down.

Some types of tweet, notably spam and 'adult content' will be filtered out.

In line with the transient nature of tweets, they will be indexed by Bing for a maximum of seven days.

Twitter CEO Evan Williams revealed that the deal with Microsoft did involve payments to Twitter, but the financial terms were not disclosed. It seems likely that Google will also be paying Twitter.

Twitter's growth in popularity was accompanied by much speculation about how it could turn its success into dollars. Well, this is one source of revenue that the company's managed to tap.

In related news, Microsoft will also begin integrating public Facebook status messages into Bing.