Bing has been staying in the public's attention since it came out and deservingly so as, coming as a surprise for some, it actually delivers a solid experience, one that is on par with and sometimes better than Google's. And now Microsoft announces an interesting new feature to put it ahead of the rest: real-time Twitter search results.

“Today we’re unveiling an initial foray into integrating more real time data into our search results, starting with some of the more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres. This includes Tweets from folks from our own search technology and business sphere like Danny Sullivan or Kara Swisher as well as those from spheres of more general consumer appeal like Al Gore or Ryan Seacrest,” Sean Suchter, general manager, Search Technology Center, said.

This is just a first step and not all tweets will be indexed as the feature is enabled only for well-known people, a few thousands to start with, Microsoft says. The company signed no special deal with Twitter, which was aware of the upcoming feature though, and the results are gathered using the service's public API.

However, the way it is implemented now, the new Twitter results aren't actually that useful as they show up just in some very specific cases. One limiting factor is, as already mentioned, the fact that the results come from a relatively small number of people, and to make things even more complicated they won't show up for every search related to those people, but just the ones that include words like “tweet” or “Twitter.”

Still, Bing is the first major search engine to incorporate real-time Twitter results and, to further show its newly found love for the service, Microsoft has also started to officially use it. Of course, many products from the company were already represented on the micro-blogging service but now the software giant has started using the main @Microsoft account.