Bing stays ahead of Google: adding Twitter to search results

Today, Bing introduces Twitter postings as part of its search results. It was first announced in a recent posting on the Bing community blog site.

Starting later today, when you search for these folks names in association with Twitter, you’ll see their latest Tweets come up in real time on Bing’s search results. For example, if you type “Kara Swisher Twitter” or “Kara Swisher Tweets” or even “@karaswisher” as your search query, you’ll see something like the below. (Note this feature will be rolling out gradually over the course of the next few hours so you may not see it right away.)

It is a very strategic & intelligent move to add Twitter postings as part of Bing’s search results. In June 2009, Twitter was ranked 23rd in terms of overall global web traffic by Alexa. In February 2009, Compete.com ranked Twitter as the third most used social network, which puts the number of unique monthly visitors at roughly 6 million and the number of monthly visits at 55 million. In March 2009, a Nielsen.com blog ranked Twitter as the fastest-growing site in the Member Communities category for February 2009.

Twitter has been know for spreading real time news & events. Most recently, it was used extensively in the coverage of the post Iranian election and the death of Michael Jackson. And for this reason, Bing plans to craw most prominent twitter accounts in terms of real time traffic and public interest.

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.

Watch out Google, here comes Bing!