bringing a bit of twitter to bing
There has been much discussion of real-time search and the premium on immediacy of data that has been created primarily by Twitter. We've been watching this phenomenon with great interest, and listening carefully to what consumers really want in this space.
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands at the end of a breakout quarter for Twitter: by late May 2009 the service had surpassed both the New York Times and Digg in growth and traffic rankings, and its role in the post-election upheaval in Iran in June made clear it had outgrown Silicon Valley to become a globally significant platform. That visibility came with baggage — users pushing raunchy terms into the trending-topics leaderboard, and analysts arguing that shared-link popularity skews toward short, Twitter- and Facebook-centric content.
First-order effects
- Microsoft's Bing now surfaces Twitter updates directly in search results, answering what the company describes as consumer demand for immediacy of data.
- Twitter gains placement for its public stream inside a major search engine's results page, converting the attention built over its May–June 2009 run into durable search distribution.
Second-order effects
- Twitter's update stream is repositioned as structured input that search engines compete to carry rather than merely crawl, raising the bargaining power of whoever owns the real-time feed.
- The analyst critique circulating since late June — that link popularity favors short content and Twitter or Facebook topics — becomes a relevance problem for Bing to manage as tweet results sit alongside traditional web pages.
Third-order effects
- If immediacy becomes a standing user expectation rather than a novelty, search competition shifts partly from index breadth toward data latency, making platform-owned streams a strategic input for engines.
- The trending-topics manipulation already documented on Twitter points toward filtering and curation becoming a required capability for any engine that surfaces raw social data at scale.
The trend: Search engines are beginning to treat social platforms' real-time streams as licensed data products rather than crawlable pages, with Twitter holding the supply.