14 DAY TRIAL // Bing is growing, and in more directions than one. The latest evolutionary step for Microsoft’s search/decision engine involves embracing the “real time” components of the web. “Real time “ has always been an elusive goal for search engines, at least until Twitter came along. Suddenly, the likes of Microsoft and Google found themselves fighting over the source of real time, user-generated content that was Twitter. And Microsoft already got to tap the social networking hotspot that is growing in popularity with the introduction of Bing Twitter.
“One of the most interesting things going on today on the Internet is the notion of the real time web. The idea of accessing data in real time has been an elusive goal in the world of search. Web indexes in search engines update at pretty amazing rates, given what it takes to crawl the entire web and index it for searching, but getting that to “real time” has been challenging,” Paul Yiu, Bing Social Search Team, noted. “The explosive popularity of Twitter is the best example of this opportunity. Twitter is producing millions of tweets every minute on every subject you can imagine.”
Yiu indicated that Microsoft considered the value of tweets as real-time generated data a key growth potential for Bing. The Redmond company is accessing Twitter content related to Windows 7 for its Social Hub focused on the latest iteration of Windows, but it sees similar value in the vox populi social network as a source of public feedback. Still, Microsoft continues to be stubborn in focusing primarily on the US market. Bing Twitter is in this regard a vertical of the search/decision engine available in Beta only to users in the US.
“Search needs to keep up. Shortly after we launched Bing, we did an experiment with the team at Twitter, where we took a fairly small number of “celebrities” from Twitter and provided access to their tweets as part of the search result. But what if we take that to the next level? What if we indexed basically the whole public Twitter stream and made it available to customers?” Yiu added. “(…) we announced that working with those clever birds over at Twitter, we now have access to the entire public Twitter feed and have a beta of Bing Twitter search for you to play with (in the US, for now).”