Binging with Twitter Updates

Nydia Davis - November 3, 2009

One of the most interesting concepts today is the inclusion of real-time web results. Web indexes from search engines update at astounding rates. It normally takes quite a long time to populate results from the entire web and to index results for searchers; but getting “real-time” results has been challenging. The immediacy of real-time data has been created primarily by Twitter.

The explosive popularity of Twitter is the best example of this “real-time” results opportunity. Twitter produces millions of tweets every minute on any subject you can imagine. Twitter lets the public express their opinions and thoughts in a way that has never before been possible.
 
Shortly after Bing launched, an experiment was conducted with the team at Twitter. A small number of “celebrities” tweets were incorporated as part of Bing search result. Here is a great example of real-time results using the keyword “Ryan Seacrest.”

What if Bing could index the Twitter stream and make it available to seachers? At The Web 2.0 Summit, Bing announced that working with the “real-time pros” over at Twitter. There now is access to the publics Twitter feeds and a beta of  Bing Twitter search has been rolled out in the US. Instead of the usual descriptions that are used for links, Bing and Twitter decided to give a “social media caption” to display what people are saying about those links.