Comments for BingTweets: Microsoft Launches a Twitter Search Engine

BingTweets: Microsoft Launches a Twitter Search Engine

2009-07-15T15:15:35Z

Microsoft, in cooperation with Federated Media and Twitter, launched its own full-blown Twitter search engine today. BingTweets mashes up real-time Twitter search with results from Bing, Microsoft's new and increasingly popular search engine. The result is an interesting hybrid product that puts Bing's search results at the center of the experience, while the real-time Twitter feed appears in a sidebar on the left. The top of the page features a list of trending topics, which are quite interesting, as BingTweets separates them out by popular terms, as well as by popular people, places, and products.

]]> Disclosure: Federated Media is a ReadWriteWeb advertising partner.

Microsoft started to integrate some Twitter search results with the main Bing search engine a few weeks ago, but these were only from very popular Twitter users. Interestingly, BingTweets will run on its own Bingtweets.com domain, and, as far as we can see, isn't linked to from the main Bing site. For now, it's a completely separate entity, but chances are that Microsoft is already experimenting with other ways to incorporate more Twitter search results into Bing.

This is Federated Media's second Twitter project together with Microsoft. The first was the launch of ExecTweets, a site that allowed users to find, follow, and engage business executives on Twitter.

Not Quite A Fusion of Twitter and Bing

Bingtweets looks like an interesting project, but while its tagline is "Fusing Twitter Trends with Bing Insights," the reality is that it displays a Twitter feed next to Bing's search results and there is no real fusion between the two.

We do like, however, that Microsoft stressed overall trends on Twitter and allows users to quickly get a grasp on what a trending topic is about. After all, Bing's results often display information about current news events like the earthquake in New Zealand today, for example. Breaking these trends down by popular terms, people, places, and products is also quite nice, and we are not aware of any other Twitter search engine that currently does this. We also like the ability to share results directly on Twitter through an oversized form at the top of the page.

Overall, this is an interesting effort, though we are not sure that Bingtweets currently offers enough value to differentiate itself from other Twitter search engines and memetrackers like Twazzup or Tweetmeme.

Comment from Chris Heilmann on 2009-07-15

2009-07-15T15:39:02Z

Hahaha, exactly what I said 5 hours ago:

http://twitter.com/codepo8/status/2648918155

Comment from Glenn on 2009-07-15

2009-07-15T15:46:40Z

Another step toward real time search! Great news!! Surprising to see it from Microsoft, though I think it's time to prepare for a lot more surprises from the behemoth.

Comment from Rob on 2009-07-15

2009-07-15T17:33:41Z

Not a big fan of the frames. There is actually a more info button on the right that is not visible using FF3.5. Also, when you click on the links in the results it keeps you in the frame.

To me, it looks like Bing Tweets was slapped together on the fly, at least the user interface.

Comment from TechCombo on 2009-07-15

2009-07-15T22:10:27Z

Honestly, I do not like Bing so much and feel that each time i go on Microsoft's search engine, often i would quickly change to google.co.uk. Now this, "fusing with twitter" Why would they want to do that? We know twitter is becoming more and more popular but it still is nothing compared to Facebook in terms of what you can do with it, all you have in twitter is 140 characters whereas Facebook is limitless... Imaging Google and Facebook launching something similar? How big would that be? How much bigger and better would that be compared to Microsoft's "Twitter Search Engine"?

Comment from Chris on 2009-07-16

2009-07-16T15:13:37Z

That's a shotgun wedding of two technologies if I've ever seen one. I'm failing to see how that's helping anyone with search. It's also not truly showing any evidence of integration or an effort to integrate real time results. Bolting it on the side isn't helping anyone.

The positive is that, from a search engine market share perspective, hardly anyone uses Twitter or Bing, and the potential number of people they'll annoy is quite small.

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2009-07-17T02:38:04Z

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Comment from George on 2009-07-20

2009-07-20T23:16:09Z

Infospace.com also incorporates twitter in it's results.
check this -
http://search.infospace.com/ispace/ws/results/Web/erin%20andrews/1/114/content-top-left/Relevance/iq=true/zoom=off/_iceUrlFlag=7?_IceUrl=true

Comment from magic on 2009-08-11

2009-08-11T22:01:39Z

very thanks for article

Comment from Luca Filigheddu on 2009-08-28

2009-08-28T08:20:46Z

Frederic,
honestly it seems pretty useless. To me, it looks like a Bing Search engine plus a useless sidebar where all the "noise" about the searched keyword appear. Does it really provide value to the user?

We integrated Bing search with Twitter search in our realtime rank-based search engine Tweefind.com months ago. The difference is that tweets are REALLY relevant and only those from highest-ranked users are shown (updated every 15 seconds with the new version launched yesterday).

That said, you can easily switch to Bing search if you need and if you want more results. Plus, we extract the most relevant and most retweeted links out from the tweets and we show them on the right sidebar thanks to Tweetmeme. Do you think it is more useful for users?

I would really appreciate a comment and a feedback by users. Ciao and keep up the good work ;-)