Bing is Bringing Twitter Search to You
One of the most interesting things going on today on the Internet is the notion of the real time web. The idea of accessing data in real time has been an elusive goal in the world of search. Web indexes in search engines update at pretty amazing rates, given what it takes to crawl the entire web and index it for searching, but getting that to “real time” has been challenging.
We’re glad you asked that. Because today at Web 2.0 we announced that working with those clever birds over at Twitter, we now have access to the entire public Twitter feed and have a beta of Bing Twitter search for you to play with (in the US, for now). Try it out. The Bing and Twitter teams want to know what you think.
The explosive popularity of Twitter is the best example of this opportunity. Twitter is producing millions of tweets every minute on every subject you can imagine. The power of those tweets as a form of data that can be surfaced in search is enormous. Innovative services like Twitter give us access to public opinion and thoughts in a way that has not before been possible. From important social and political issues to keeping friends up to date on the minute-by-minute of our daily lives, the web is getting more and more real time.
Search needs to keep up. Shortly after we launched Bing, we did an experiment with the team at Twitter, where we took a fairly small number of “celebrities” from Twitter and provided access to their tweets as part of the search result. Here is a great example.
But what if we take that to the next level? What if we indexed basically the whole public Twitter stream and made it available to customers?
I keep reading tweets and news articles either questioning, or in some cases flat out stating that blogging is dead. I’m here to say that regardless of what other websites have to say about this, blogging is not dead. Most of the articles point to Twitter or Facebook as the new craze. These sites definitely add to the social experience of the web, and add value to social media. Blogging may be on the decline as web usage changes over time, but blogging is here to stay.
Even I have that habit of reading tweets and articles, what you said is true that blogging is definitely going to stay even though many come and go. It is a concept where one shares their thought, idea and interests just as they do in their dairies.