Bing Partners With Twitter and Facebook for Real-Time Search

Microsoft’s search engine Bing has struck a deal with Facebook and the hot micro-messaging service Twitter, a brash attempt to add real-time web updates to its search results in order to make Google look like a lumbering dinosaur. Qi Lu, a longtime Yahoo engineer who became Microsoft’s VP of online services last August, announced the […]

Microsoft's search engine Bing has struck a deal with Facebook and the hot micro-messaging service Twitter, a brash attempt to add real-time web updates to its search results in order to make Google look like a lumbering dinosaur.

Qi Lu, a longtime Yahoo engineer who became Microsoft's VP of online services last August, announced the deal on stage at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco Wednesday.

The beta site should go live within an hour, the company said, and can be found at Bing.com/Twitter.

Microsoft is going live Wednesday with a beta test of real-time search powered by a strategic partnership with Twitter, where Microsoft gets access to all public Twitter updates in real time. The company also announced a partnership with Facebook, getting access to the status updates that people make public.

Terms of the deals were not revealed, but licensing a real-time pipe of instant data updates could give Twitter and Facebook a steady source of revenue.

"We do not disclose financial terms," Lu said under questioning from tech publisher Tim O'Reilly. "The key is this is a start. We believe there are more opportunities in our partnership with Twitter."

Microsoft's Twitter search is real-time and automatically refreshes, filters out duplicates and has ways to look for the most popular topics and links.

It's not unlike other real-time search engines that have emerged to help make sense of Twitter's flood of updates, but Lu says the stream has data that will eventually be used to make Bing's main search engine smarter and better at understanding user's intentions.

"In a real-time corpus like Twitter, there are a lot of important velocity signals in Twitter," Lu said. "We have enough signals to work with and you can use those to augment today's search experience."

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