Hoping to get whip hand in the real-time search war, Microsoft’s Bing search engine is now including the popular Twitter users in its search results. Users just have to search on their name with the word “Twitter” added to it, and Bing will show Twitter results of the celebrities. Twitter results will be updated on Bing every 60 seconds.
Initially, Bing has selected some thousand prominent Twitterers from different domains. The selection was based on the number of followers and the volume of tweets they produce.
Some of the prominent personalities include:
- Search analyst, Danny Sullivan
- American environmental activist, Al Gore
- American Idol host, Ryan Seacrest
- Actor, Ashton Kutcher
- Technology journalist, Kara Swisher, etc.
Bing will use Twitter’s public API to display those results in a special box among the other search results, such as stories that a person might have written about Twitter.
How does it work?
- Just search for some of these names with the word Twitter. For instance: “Ryan Seacrest Twitter” or “Ryan Seacrest Tweets” or even “@ryanseacrest”
- You’ll see their latest Tweets show up in real time on Bing’s search results like
- Person’s latest Tweets
- A link to “See more tweets” from that individual
Unlike other search engines, Bing will display multiple tweets within a single defined box, a search for say “Kara Swisher Twitter.”
Bing happens to be the first major search engine to integrate with Twitter in this way. Hopefully this move would keep the buzz alive.
(Source & Image credits: Bing search blog)