Bing has started rolling out a new feature called Social Search. This allows you to see real-time results from Twitter right alongside your Bing search results. If that sounds familiar, it should. Google has been doing it for a little while now. This feature has been rolled out to a subset of Bing users, so you may not have access to it just yet. The goal here seems to be to give you real-time trending results alongside the sites you might expect to find. You’re basically getting the best of both worlds in one shot.
Microsoft has actually had a deal with Twitter for a while now and initially offered Twitter results via an entirely separate beta site. Now, these results will be integrated into your actual search results.
Bing pulls in social content generated on Twitter to surface the most relevant updates within seconds of a breaking news event. From people on the ground tweeting about what’s happening around them to users sharing interesting news links while browsing at home, the Twitterati can be significantly faster than traditional media outlets in picking up information on breaking events. Further, the Twitterati also picks up information that the traditional media outlets often ignore – such as the latest viral video being shared online.
The feature should be available to most Bing users “very soon” according to Microsoft. In addition to helping fill out your standard searches, Bing will also keep an eye on trending topics and fold in tweets on those topics from Twitter within your search results. This will help you keep your finger on the pulse of the Internet.
It’s not really surprising that Google and now Bing have decided to make social media a part of their search strategy. f course you want your old standbys when search for things, but times are changing and many people aren’t satisfied with simply knowing about things that have happened. They want to know what’s happening now at this moment or even what might possibly be happening in the very near future. To give the people the information they hunger for, integrating social media sites is the next logical step.