Bing and Google announce Twitter Search

Last week, only hours apart, Microsoft and Google both announced deals with Twitter to bring results from the live Twitter stream into their respective search engines. This is in addition, to search.twitter.com, Twitter's own search engine which has been a go-to place for people looking to find mentions or trends in the Twitter stream. By placing these search results along side other results--web, images, news and so forth--all in one place, it gives users the ability to find information wherever it is (even as it is being produced).

The implications for social networking traffic as a promotional tool means that you are no longer confining your information to the social network where you posted it. Instead you are bringing it to the broader world inside search engines where a lot more people are watching. (On the flip side, if you say something stupid, it's much more likely people will see it than before.)

I decided to do an experiment and compare the three services. It's worth noting that Google has still not fully implemented its Twitter search and may not for several months (according to this Ziff-Davis.net blog post by Garet Rogers).

• First I went to search.twitter.com and I entered my Twitter name (@ron_miller). I got eight pages of mentions going back nine days.
• Next, I went to Bing's Twitter Search page and entered my sample search. The results I got were actually rather strange. Rather than a list of mentions as I expected, I got a page with exactly two results regarding an article link I posted recently, one of many things on which I posted. Not sure why Bing decided to focus on this, yet didn't have one result where I was actually mentioned.
• Finally, when entering the same search into Google Search, I didn't see Twitter results, per se, but I did see sites where Twitter results were collected and my search criteria matched, so it did work in that sense. As I mentioned, this is not a full test of the Google implemenation, since it's still not available just yet (so far as I could tell).

What I found, however, was that for pure search, so far at least, it seems that you are still better off using Twitter's search engine to find information on what's going in Twitter. It's highly likely that the two other search engines will refine this process and make it more useful moving forward, but  for now Bing clearly needs work and we will have to wait for Google's implementation and see how it works.

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