Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) said Wednesday its Bing search engine will start including "tweets," short user-generated updates sent via the micro-blogging Web site Twitter.com, in its search results.The first of the three major Internet search engines to include this functionality, Bing's move shows the importance Internet companies are attaching to "real time" blogging services like Twitter, and likely foreshadows an arms race as digital marketers try to make money searching through this content.
Starting Wednesday, Microsoft said in a blog posting on its Web site, search results from Bing will include "tweets" from some more prominent Twitter users.
Examples of "prominent Twitterers" Microsoft cited include celebrities like Al Gore and Ryan Seacrest, alongside Internet industry experts such as Danny Sullivan and Kara Swisher, a blogger for AllthingsD, a Web site owned by Dow Jones & Co., publisher of this newswire and a unit of News Corp. (NWS)
Real-time search, which is in its infancy, is regarded by Internet marketers as a promising source of future advertising revenue, due to the exploding popularity of services like Twitter Inc., a San Francisco-based startup.
These marketers believe real-time search will help them more effectively target advertisements to consumers interested in specific celebrities, breaking news events, activities or topics. Some forecasters have said real-time search could become a billion-dollar market.
Microsoft's search engine, formerly known as Live Search, was overhauled in May as part of a multi-million dollar push to win market share from Google Inc. (GOOG), the clear market leader. Although Google, which has around 75% of all paid clicks in the U.S., isn't seen as in any short-term danger of being supplanted, Bing has ratcheted up modest market share gains since its launch a month ago, according to multiple data sources.
The world's largest software company, Microsoft has for several years struggled to claw gains from Google, and its Internet business unit continues to lose money, despite years of investment.
Being the first major search engine to market with the ability to let users search "tweets" could win some consumer converts and help attract additional marketing dollars.
Marketers say that making sense of "tweets" efficiently enough to place advertising next to them and target it at appropriate users can be challenging. Traditional Internet search favors older Web pages, which have gathered credibility and large audiences over time. By contrast, "tweets" come out rapidly from users of unknown provenance. Parsing the relevance of the "tweet" and its source can be difficult for marketers.
Google and Yahoo Inc. (YHOO), the No. 2 search engine, are also both working on developing real time search, and all three search engine companies have spoken with Twitter about partnerships in the past.
