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It's been said many times in the month since Bing's debut that Bing needs a "thing" to make it stand up and challenge Google, and while Microsoft lags way behind Google in search traffic -- and doesn't seem poised to make much in the way of leaps and bounds -- the Twitter alliance has to be a step in the right direction. Maybe it's not that "thing," but Microsoft's small Bing victories are still that: victories.
Microsoft confirmed the Twitter relationship in a Thursday blog post, and while it won't be an anything-goes Twitter free-for-all on Bing, Bing will index Twitter updates (aka Tweets) from celebrities like former Vice President Al Gore and many of Microsoft's own Twitter users.
"We're not indexing all of Twitter at this time, just a small set of prominent and prolific Twitterers to start," wrote Sean Suchter, general manager of Microsoft's Silicon Valley Search Technology Center. "We picked a few thousand people to start, based primarily on their follower count and volume of Tweets. We think this is an interesting first step toward using Twitter's public API to surface Tweets in people search. We'd love to hear your feedback as we think through future possibilities in real-time search."
How much of a step is the Twitter addition? It's hard to say at the outset. For one thing, Microsoft has spent a lot of time -- not to mention a lot of money -- trying to position Bing as a "smarter" search engine. By indexing Twitter updates, Bing won't exactly broaden its appeal to those who think Twitter's real-time search update platform is information overload without much of a value-add.
Still, it's getting harder and harder to deny Twitter as a technological and cultural force, and its strengths have been acknowledged plenty by Google, Facebook and other competition. That no other search engine yet indexes Twitter the way Bing does gives Microsoft a leg-up -- it can experiment with how to leverage Twitter to make the most sense for Bing, with the confidence it had Twitter-indexing capability for search engines first.
Microsoft has made not insignificant gains in search market share since Bing went live June 1. One analytics firm, StatCounter Global Stats, put Bing's first-month share at 8.23 percent, and while that puts it what seems like light years away from Google's 78.48 percent share, it puts Bing in the backyard of Yahoo, the No. 2 search engine, and its 11.04 percent share.
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