BingTweets Beta Is Live

A marriage between Bing and Twitter comes to satisfy Microsoft’s vision of the continuous evolution of its search engine in terms of the content growth, correlated with the need to supply users with query results tailored to an immediacy of data paradigm that only tweets can provide. The Redmond company is certainly no stranger to flirting with social networking services, but following the launch of its Live Search killer, the software giant stepped up its efforts to bridge the search engine with Twitter. BingTweets is the latest result of Microsoft’s efforts to make Bing more relevant by offering real-time content.

“As part of our ongoing efforts to explore options in real-time search, we’ve partnered with Federated Media and Twitter to create BingTweets which fuses Bing search results and real time content from Twitter in an interesting new interface. How does partnering with Twitter make Bing a more effective decision engine? Many people share their thoughts on Twitter, and search engines don’t currently do a great job of capturing that real-time content. We designed Bing to help you make faster, more informed decisions, and, since people often turn to real-time content to help them make decisions, BingTweets was a logical next step,” revealed Whitney Burk, director, Bing.

BingTweets is designed to be the cherry on top of the Bing search/decision engine cake. In Microsoft’s perspective, users can turn to Bing for a variety of information, including maps, locations, reviews, etc., but always with the “delay” associated with the indexing process, between when new content is published and when it becomes available through the search engine. With BingTweets the software giant aims to provide real-time results to events occurred even moments ahead of a search.

“BingTweets pulls in trends from Twitter and filters into categories such as “Popular Now,” “People,” “Places” and “Products” enabling easier navigation of the ever changing trends on the Web. You can also fire off a search on any topic of your choosing to see the related search results from Bing and Twitter discussion,” Burk added.

At the same time, BingTweets is not the first attempt from Microsoft to make Bing play nice with Twitter. Earlier this month the company announced that it was indexing “a small set of prominent and prolific Twitterers to start,” but not all of Twitter, according to Sean Suchter, general manager, Search Technology Center, Silicon Valley.