Bing includes Twitter in results – real time search? Not Quite

The Bing v/s Google Battle has been raging on for quite some time now. Companies are giving Twitter a lot of attention, and it’s not rivals like Facebook , but software giant Microsoft who has also entered the Twitter arena to grab as much attention as possible. In a recent report, Microsoft has started tweeting, they have a lot of products which are constantly being discussed on Twitter, and has probably realized the necessity of having an official mouthpiece on the popular platform.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s fast emerging search / decision engine Bing seems to be growing at a decent rate. They seem to be trying their best to one-up market leader Google by being the first to introduce Real-time Tweets as part of their search. We did a recent analysis of real time search engines, and Microsoft seems to be rushing to tackle the challenge head-on. However, don’t be disillusioned, your tweets will not feature on Bing. The catch – only high-profile Twitterers / Tweeters (?) will be indexed and feature on Bing’s search results. As PC World editor correctly points out, it seems almost an attempt for the heck of it without adding much utility to the search capabilities. Bing’s famous “decision” engine merely features the most recent tweets of famous people if we search for them. Several famous personalities like Ryan Seacrest and Al Gore are added to the  strong list of about a thousand something. What is seemingly hard to understand is what Bing hopes to achieve by adding their tweets to search results. If people were inquisitive about “their “views on pertinent topics, following them would probably be a more useful option. Hopefully, Bing will be expanding the scope of their indexing soon. Whether, that will affect their main marketing campaign against Google of providing “streamlined” results with less junk is to be seen.

Meanwhile, rumours have been around for quite a while about Google entering real-time search. Google has obviously noticed the potential of micro-blogging and real time results, though it is doing little now to promote its own platform Jaiku. In a rather funny observation, a search on google for “search engine” returns Altavista as the 1st result, Bing as the third, and Google a distant eighth. Bing features neither itself now Google. It might seem forced with Bing promoting itself as a “Decision Engine”, but what about Google? A lack of identity or a different perception of itself as opposed to what it initially gained recognition as? One can only wonder about the reason for the apparent paradox.