Real time is the talk of the town these days but so far the big search engines have been outmaneuvered by small startups. Twitter is currently 'the' place for real-time information but the means of accessing it are still lacking. Twitter's own search engine is a good place to start but it is fairly limited. As such, a number of startups have popped up to fill in the space but so far there hasn't been one that stood out. Now though, it's time for the big boys to give it a shot, with both Google and Bing announcing search deals with Twitter and with Bing actually having a working dedicated search engine in beta.

The new Bing Twitter Beta is live over at bing.com/twitter and the search engine comes with some interesting features and a unique layout. The Bing Twitter homepage greets users with a trending topics section followed by the hottest links shared related to the trending topics. Doing a search returns the most recent tweets at the top in chronological order just like Twitter search but below this section Bing Twitter also returns the most popular links, which are connected with the search.

Twitter obviously is excited about all of this though it may be more excited about the money that will start pouring in from Bing and Google. And considering that it hasn't been able to provide a proper search experience on its own maybe it is the right thing to do. Twitter has always had an open attitude toward third-party developers and has also been very open with its data so the fact that the service has signed these non-exclusive deals with the two search engines isn't much of a surprise. In any case the real-time war is starting to heat up and it can only be a good thing for Twitter, which has seen traffic growth grind to a halt lately.

“We have a team focused on delivering value from a search and discovery perspective at Twitter and they're just getting started. Twitter is earning a reputation for delivering real-time results to queries about things that are happening right now,” Twitter cofounder Biz Stone said. “Twitter is providing Bing access to the overwhelming deluge of public, real-time tweets rushing in from all around the world so they can help you find those that make the most sense right now.”