Hands on with Bing’s real-time Twitter search

Bing has gained access to the entire public Twitter feed, which has enabled Microsoft to launch Twitter real-time search results in beta over at Bing.com/Twitter. Microsoft isn't the only one, as Google announced its own Twitter search deal within hours. Microsoft has also announced a global partnership with Facebook that will bring the social site's status updates to Bing search results, but that experience will be available at a later date that Microsoft refused to reveal.

Both the Twitter and Facebook deals are nonexclusive, but Google doesn't yet have an actual implementation, so the company is currently playing catch-up with the underdog of search. Given what Bing is offering right now though, we wouldn't be surprised if Google did more than just catch up.

The fact that Microsoft is the first to offer real-time search of Twitter feeds is impressive in itself, but this initial implementation is not without its kinks. First of all, the beta service is completely separate from Bing: Microsoft hasn't found a way to integrate it into Bing.com. Second, Twitter search has the annoying limitation that all new features for Bing seem to have: it's US-only. Everyone outside the US currently gets the following nonsense error message when trying to access the service: "Twitter search results are currently unavailable."

If you do not reside within the US, make sure to click your language in the top right corner of Bing and set it to United States-English. This might not seem like the end of the world at first, as the workaround to this irritation is so easy, but since Bing likes to reset your location to the one it detects based on your IP, non-US users have to frequently switch back in order to get many features that they should be getting regardless.

Hands on

To see Bing's real-time Twitter search in action for yourself, check out the title of this article: Hands on with Bing's real-time Twitter search. It's a slight improvement over what Twitter currently offers at search.twitter.com as it removes duplicates, and filters out spam and adult items.

Check out these screenshots with searches for "bing" and "Bing":

Notice how the header "Top links shared in Tweets about [query]" was reordered to be below "Most recent Tweets about [query]." When we checked the first query again, it had changed to have the "most recent tweets" on top, meaning that Microsoft decided to show tweets first, and then tweets with links. The tweets showcased are the most relevant tweets, as determined by Bing. The service determines relevancy by looking at the Tweeter's popularity, interestingness of the tweet, number of retweets, captions, keywords, and other indicators of quality and trustworthiness.

Also noticeable in the second screenshot is that there's a simple Pause/Play button above the retweet links that lets you stop or start finding new tweets in real-time. Microsoft refused to share how often it searches for new tweets. There's also an option to rank tweets either by most recent or by "best match," according to Bing. Additionally, instead of showing standard search result captions, Bing selects the top two tweets to give users a glimpse of the sentiment around the shared link (and automatically expands any short URLs it finds).

Soon after Bing launched in June 2009, Microsoft started indexing select Twitter feeds, mainly very popular ones. Now the company is taking it to the next level by trying to index all of Twitter. It's no surprise that Microsoft is starting with Twitter; Facebook has a significantly larger user base with many more status updates, and it's much easier to start small for something as new as real-time search.