Google Follows Bing After Coveted Twitter Data

By Chelsi Nakano (@chelkano) Oct 22, 2009 Comments

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For months, both Google and Microsoft have been vying for Twitter’s (news, site) affection in an attempt to gain access to today’s Holy Grail of real-time information.

Yesterday it seemed the war between Tweedledee and Tweedledum was finally over as Microsoft announced a deal to bring not only tweets to Bing, but Facebook data as well. Of course, just a few short hours later, Google declared a Twitter deal of their own.

Meaning? It. Just. Got. Interesting.

RT @Bing, #Bing, #ZOMG

In a change of pace (which we expect will last for at least the next few hours) it seems Microsoft currently has what could be perceived as the upper hand. Their search engine Bing has actually been in cahoots with Twitter since debuting in May of this year. In fact, Microsoft’s testing of the integration has been taking place right under our noses via Bing’s inclusion of a select few “celebrity” Twitter streams in their results.

For example, if you recently used Bing to search for information about the decision to oust Paula Abdul from American Idol's panel, you might’ve gotten results that went a little something like this:

Isn’t that great? Because honestly, who wouldn’t want to know about Ryan Seacrest’s sadness? Probably a lot of people, actually. Accordingly, team Bing asked on their community blog in a post that announced their new deal with Twitter, “…what if we take that to the next level?”

The next level, according to Microsoft, means indexing the entire public Twitter stream. Now, not only will users get Ryan Seacrest’s opinion on Paula Abdul, but perhaps their neighbor’s as well. Microsoft’s beta of the new Bing Twitter search is already available for y'all to play with, and results show up in two ways:

Search a topic and watch the Tweets roll in real-time, just like in a regular Twitter search
Search a topic and click "See more Tweets about…" to be redirected to a page full of related Tweets. Within that page you can change the order to "Best Match" which rearranges Tweets based on the number of followers

Additionally, Microsoft claims you won’t see any of your tweets if you've protected or deleted them, and tweets don’t last more than 7 days in the index.

RT @Google, #Google, #ZOMG

Google has been surprisingly less specific about what it’s going to mean now that they too can include Twitter’s feed in their search results. In a short blog post by Marissa Mayer, Google's Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, she simply writes:

…we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months.

A pretty anti-climactic tag along, if you ask us. But then again it is Google, and Microsoft has been equally cryptic about its inclusion of Facebook data which could be the one differentiating factor in this great race for data. Whether or not it will put them in the lead or have the exact opposite effect, remains to be seen.

Ryan’s Sadness and Kanye’s Grave

We don’t need to get into why including a massive amount of real-time results in search engines as big as Bing and Google is beneficial. Twitter’s success speaks volumes to how dependant we’ve become on second to second information. Unfortunately, it’s alerted us to a bunch of really useless mumbo jumbo as well. Take, for instance, the top trending topics on Twitter right this minute: