Twitter posts hit Bing

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 2 Jul 2009 at 08:48

Microsoft has begun adding Twitter posts to Bing search results, as it looks to take advantage of the immense popularity of the micro-blogging site.

According to a Microsoft blog posting, the company was drawn to Twitter's ability to instantly reflect developing topics and public sentiment.

"There has been much discussion of real-time search and the premium on immediacy of data that has been created primarily by Twitter," wrote Sean Suchter, general manager of Microsoft's Silicon Valley Search Technology Center, on a company blog.

"We've been watching this phenomenon with great interest, and listening carefully to what consumers really want in this space. We're not indexing all of Twitter at this time... just a small set of prominent and prolific Twitterers to start.

"We think this is an interesting first step toward using Twitter's public API to surface Tweets in people search," he concluded.

The launch is something of a coup for Microsoft, which becomes the first major search company to index Tweets. However, the company has admitted that it will initially only index a "few thousand people, based primarily on their follower count and volume of tweets," including Al Gore and Ashton Kutcher.

This number is expected to rise depending on the success of the service, which is currently only available to those making searches on the US site, and requires users to enter the word Twitter after their search.