Microsoft in its attempt to challenge Google in Internet Search has added real-time search capability to its new Bing search engine. Users can use Bing to find the latest Twitter tweets from celebrities and other persons of note, including high-tech journalists. The move comes as startups CrowdEye, Collecta and others are propagating the Web with real-time search.
The feature is real-time search, or the ability to locate data generated at a specific moment in time online. Microblog service Twitter has given rise to this phenomenon, with millions of users leaving brief messages throughout the day.
However, modern search engines were not programmed to account for such immediacy; high-tech reporters have been complaining for months that search engines don't index real-time search data from Twitter and other content sources.
Sean Suchter, general manager of Microsoft's Search Technology Centre said Bing is not indexing Twitter in its entirety just yet; this is a gradual rollout. "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."
Will this be enough to attract the 65%+ of all global Internet searches away from Google?