Microsoft’s Bing has taken its first tentative steps into the world of real-time search. They are introducing results from Twitter into their search results.
Recent events like the death of Michael Jackson exposed not only the inadequacy of traditional news outlets in disseminating the story quickly - but also that of search engines like Google, that took over two hours to begin showing links to articles about the singer’s death in response to searches for “Michael Jackson.”
Conversely, Twitter was awash with the news within seconds of its release by a small website. Any real-time indexing of tweets on that day would have brought the story to the attention of non-tweeting world a great deal faster.
However, Microsoft’s Bing is only going to be indexing the tweets of the more prominent and prolific twitters to begin with. They will be chosen by follower count and obviously the volume of their tweets.
In order to find the results from Twitter on Bing you will have to add “twitter” or “tweets” to the name of the person for whom you are searching. You can even search by the Twitterer’s username e.g “@intrahostltd”, although that does beg the question why not just look up the account on Twitter? Anyway, Bing’s search results will include the person’s latest tweets and a link to see more.
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