Bing + Twitter = BingTweets = Not a bad start

Bing recently added Twitter feeds as part of its search results. Today, Federated Media & Bing announced the launch of BingTweets, a website that combines Twitter search results and Bing search results onto one page.

Federated Media’s Announcement of BingTweets

A few months ago, FM, Twitter and Microsoft announced a groundbreaking partnership in the form of ExecTweets. See here for Twitter’s blog post announcement. This has proven to be an enormously successful site that offers a curated Twitter stream from leading business executives – all in one easy to find (and follow) format.

Now we are elated to announce BingTweets, created in partnership with Microsoft’s Bing search engine.

BingTweets combines Twitter trends with Bing search results, enabling users to see deeper, real-time information about the hottest topics on Twitter. Search for anything in the BingTweets search box (at the top right of every page) and see Bing search results alongside the most recent related tweets.

Bing Community Blog’s Announcement of BingTweets

As part of our ongoing efforts to explore options in real-time search, we’ve partnered with Federated Media and Twitter to create BingTweets which fuses Bing search results and real time content from Twitter in an interesting new interface. How does partnering with Twitter make Bing a more effective decision engine? Many people share their thoughts on Twitter, and search engines don’t currently do a great job of capturing that real-time content. We designed Bing to help you make faster, more informed decisions, and, since people often turn to real-time content to help them make decisions, BingTweets was a logical next step.

For example, when Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince comes out tomorrow, you may want to scan the official reviews, local theater listing, AND the latest Tweets on the movie to help you decide whether to rush to see it. With BingTweets, you can cover all that ground in one place.

BingTweets pulls in trends from Twitter and filters into categories such as “Popular Now,” “People,” “Places” and “Products” enabling easier navigation of the ever changing trends on the Web. You can also fire off a search on any topic of your choosing to see the related search results from Bing and Twitter discussion.

Here is a screenshot BingTweets.com

In this picture, the user was searching for Ryan Howard. The left hand side shows the most recent tweets from Twitter containing the phrase Ryan Howard. The Bing search results are displayed in the iFrame in the center of the page.

Here is our review of BingTweets.com

• +Real time search results.
• -The page design is too cluttered
• -Bing results are displayed in an iFrame. Bad for navigation
• -Twitter results are not filtered. More irrelevant search results
• -Twitter has about 20 million users. A very small user base for BingTweets

Our Recommendations for improvement

• Add the twitter live feed on Bing.com.
• Filter Twitter feeds. Not everything on Twitter is useful.