I have to admit, I’m personally thrilled to hear this latest bit of Bing news: the new search engine is now incorporating actual tweets into their search results. No longer do I have to find some Greasemonkey-powered workaround or rely on an IE add-on to see what’s being said on Twitter – it’s just baked into the search results themselves.
However, Bing isn’t indexing all of Twitter at this time. Instead, they’ve identified some of the “more prominent and prolific Twitterers” - only a few thousand people to begin with, actually.
When you search for one of these folks in relation to Twitter, you’ll see their latest tweets appear in the Bing results. For example, search for “Kara Swisher Twitter,” “Kara Swisher Tweets,” or even “@karaswisher” and you’ll see something like this:
Only adding a small group of users to the index may be disappointing to some, but the Bing team says it’s just the first step toward using Twitter’s public API to bring tweets into search. They’re now looking for feedback as to how they should proceed in the future.
Here’s my suggestion: index it all! If someone actually takes the time to search for @sarahintampa using Bing, why not reveal my tweets? I also wouldn’t mind seeing a new vertical added to the top navigation specifically for Twitter…that would be really helpful when tracking a breaking story, for instance. But those are just my ideas. What are yours? Tell the Bing team here.
