Microsoft has come up with a cool new feature for Bing. It has started showing tweets in the results for popular Twitter users. Tweets with profile image and link show up when you search for popular Twitter users such as Robert Scoble or @aplusk. This is one of the first integrations of Twitter by a major search engine by default, as you can already ad similar capabilities to Yahoo Search through the Yahoo Search Gallery, which isn’t that convenient.
To see the tweets, you’ll have to use the word twitter, tweet or @{Twitter user name} in your search query on Bing. This doesn’t work perfectly yet as I found out because when I search for @aplusk, this is what I get:
But, change the query to Ashton Kutcher Tweets, and this is what you get:
This could be attributed to the fact that this feature will roll out gradually over the next few hours, but all other queries have been working fine for me thus far.
Only a few thousand people will be indexed based on follower count and their volume of tweets:
We’re not indexing all of Twitter at this time… just a small set of prominent and prolific Twitterers to start. 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.
What do you think of this new feature? Does it make search any better for you?
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