Google, Microsoft's Bing to Include Twitter in Search
But Will Integrations Bring Revenue or Users to Microblogging Service?
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Twitter updates, now known mostly to the users of the microblogging service, are about to get a lot more ubiquitous.
It could also mean Twitter's first meaningful source of revenue, though neither side disclosed business details. Twitter CEO Evan Williams told the New York Times that "revenue was not the focus of the deals."
The deals are a foray into indexing the real-time conversations occurring on the web. Microsoft also said Wednesday that Bing would soon integrate Facebook updates, but only those made public by their users. Twitter updates, unless locked by the user, are presumed to be public.
"Real-time updates like those on Twitter have appeared not only as a way for people to communicate their thoughts and feelings, but also as an interesting source of data about what is happening right now in regard to a particular topic," wrote Google VP Marissa Mayer in a blog post.
Every tweet
Microsoft executive Yusuf Mehdi gave a demonstration at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco of how Twitter updates -- tweets -- would be integrated into search results for Bing. Until now, Bing had indexed only certain tweets from celebrities or prominent journalists.
Now every Twitter update will be indexed in real-time. But, unlike Twitter's own search engine, Bing.com will assign value to tweets in a bid to surface those with the most informational value.
Longer tweets, those that contain added information and links, and tweets from users with many followers on Twitter will be assigned a higher value, say, than a tweet like "that sucks," Mr. Mehdi said. Similar tweets, the kind that overwhelm the service on a daily basis, on topics such as "balloon boy" or President Obama's Nobel prize, will also be filtered.
The indexing of Twitter and Facebook updates into search has long been expected. "We've thought Twitter's real-time pulse should naturally feed into search results, just like results for news or shopping," said Dema Zlotin, VP and co-founder of search-marketing firm Covario.
But making it useful for users and advertisers presents a challenge. "The issue isn't just about serving up real-time Twitter results; the engines will also need to determine relevancy of those results," said Kevin Lee, CEO of search marketing firm Didit. "Google and Bing have different systems for determining relevancy in 'standard' search results, so it will be interesting to watch how their different systems adapt to weeding relevant results from irrelevant results and spam for real-time information."
The question is whether this will drive faster adoption for Twitter, which has grown quickly in the U.S. but has been slowing down. Steve Rubel, senior VP-insights for Edelman Digital, is skeptical. "It can boost its traffic, but the reality is that I believe Twitter may be peaking in terms of users," he said. "The media monsoon has brought a ton of new users in, but fundamentally I believe that everyone who wants to publicly tweet is already doing so."
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25% of my blog readers come from twitter. Free traffic. I expect this number to jump to 30-35% in the coming months with the search engines deal.
Free traffic is good, and Twitter is great for that when you have something valuable to offer your followers.
Mawuna KOUTONIN
Knowledge for Free Advertising
http://linkcrafter.com
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I have to kick out an average of 15 jerks, bozos and leaches OUT of my Twitter account every week now. Now their same rants and stupid comment are going to be part of a Bing or Google search?
Please. Shoot me now. Somebody shoot me and put me out of my misery.
I see some problems for a real estate home search simply because there's the potential of having millions of "Tweets" which might be confusing if you search for Homes in your area.
"Did you see that last episode of House?" (and I'm referring to Hugh Laurie's TV show: HOUSE)
Hopefully smart people like Google's Matt Cutts can figure this one out.
Up until now, Bing only used Celebrity Tweets. Ophra says something. Al Gore says something. Arnold Schwartzenager or President Obama. Now... who knows? We'll see how this one shakes out.
I've been micro-interrupted so many times with my iPhone with people Tweeting on Twitter I've just turned the damned service off so I can get some work done.
I could care less that Arnold was pissed off that a photographer caught his wife red handed driving with a phone stuck to her ear. I'm thankful that the California fires were put out, but Arnold like to Tweet a lot. He Tweets seven times, sometimes fifteen times a day.
He should change his name to the Tweet-a-nator instead of Gov-a-nator.
President Obama only Tweets three or so times a day and it's usually to rally us or thank us for calling in for support of the helping to fix the Healthcare system. these are valuable Tweets, but when you add up all of them with Arnold and getting Tweets about the Balloon Boy from CNN I've just atarted to lose my concentration. Nothing is getting done.
I've turned my iPhone Twitter OFF. I'm sick of Twitter and quite frankly, thousands of my readers are hacked off at Twitter too.
Twitter, like Facebook has become a real time waster for many businesses and to prove my point, many businesses are creating policies to stop employees wasting company time by screwing off.
Google AdWords, natural SEO has a place. But adding Tweets to the search results is not going to be a good thing. People less and more relevant information.
Asking us to wade through a bunch of meaningless Tweets about what someone had for lunch is going to make me lose mine.
-- bart
Marketers already have more than enough tools to track tweets in real time. Unfortunately most Twitter search tools simply serve up raw tweetage, the collective outpourings of the millions of Twitterers obsessed with achieving their 140 characters of fame, with no differentiation between the highly credentialled and ... well, anyone else. That's a huge plus for equal rights, but the downside is that there's no easy way to find the valuable needle in the virtual haystack.
So ... Google, Bing, welcome to the twitterverse. Your welcome will be truly warm if you can provide us with the same relevancy mechanisms as you bring to the rest of the web: filtering and ranking based on contributor, context and community.
Michael Carney
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Blogging on marketing ideas, trends & inspiration from around the world at
"Michael Carney's Marketing Rag"
http://www.MarketingRag.com
Kenneth
http://www.worldmotion.blogspot.com
Yahoo search may benefit from this if Google and Bing become dominated by useless Tweets.
http://proudtoliveinamerica.com
As for including tweets, well I really don't see what kind of tweets would be relevant for a average "Google/Bing" user. Tweets are relevant only in a specific context and not in a search engine.
Adrian Cojocaru
AQUASoft New Media Marketing JR Executive
www.aquasoft.ro
http://twitter.com/AQUASoft
The key, as others have mentioned, is with the filtering and prioritizing tweets. I have faith that search engines will be able to do this effectively to give us relevant and important information. But maybe I am being too optimistic.
It will be interesting to see how much this will affect SEO. Hopefully not very much as it would be an unfortunate side effect if Twitter became flooded with tweets trying to boost PageRank.
Including tweets in search results is going to be useful for people who don't use Twitter rather than those who already do. I think that this is an exciting advancement in the way we interact with information online and am looking forward to seeing where this goes.
http://twitter.com/PhiljKowalski