Have you ever searched for information on something that is happening right now, only to find out that there’s nothing matching what you’re looking for? News on an earthquake that just happened or information on a hot new product announcement may not show up until hours after the event actually occurred. One of the cool features that we have recently released will give you better relevance with real-time social results from the Twitter community.
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.
At Bing, we analyze what topics are generating the most interest on Twitter to bring you the latest and most interesting content. So if you wanted to find out more information on the just-announced Kin phone from Microsoft, you’ll be able to discover it on Bing as the announcement was being made and journalists started tweeting about the product.
On a related note, we are also using Twitter data to show you the most popular shared links for navigational queries. So if you’re looking for the most popular celebrity news on TMZ, Bing will show you which links people are sharing the most on Twitter.
We are currently testing these features with a small subset of our users and queries – so you may or may not see it appearing on your search results page. We plan to make the feature available to our users in the US within a short period. So please keep an eye out for our social results feature – you will start seeing it on your search results page very soon!
Lawrence Kim – Bing Social Search
Last October, we announced the launch of bing.com/twitter which pulls in real-time content from the Twitter community. We are now incorporating the same Twitter data into our main Bing search experience. You can read more on that announcement in these other posts of interest: