Microsoft, in cooperation with Federated Media and Twitter, launched its own full-blown Twitter search engine today. BingTweets mashes up real-time Twitter search with results from Bing, Microsoft’s new and increasingly popular search engine. The result is an interesting hybrid product that puts Bing’s search results at the center of the experience, while the real-time Twitter feed appears in a sidebar on the left. The top of the page features a list of trending topics, which are quite interesting, as BingTweets separates them out by popular terms, as well as by popular people, places, and products.
Disclosure: Federated Media is a ReadWriteWeb advertising partner.
Microsoft started to integrate some Twitter search results with the main Bing search engine a few weeks ago, but these were only from very popular Twitter users. Interestingly, BingTweets will run on its own Bingtweets.com domain, and, as far as we can see, isn’t linked to from the main Bing site. For now, it’s a completely separate entity, but chances are that Microsoft is already experimenting with other ways to incorporate more Twitter search results into Bing.
This is Federated Media’s second Twitter project together with Microsoft. The first was the launch of ExecTweets, a site that allowed users to find, follow, and engage business executives on Twitter.
Not Quite A Fusion of Twitter and Bing
Bingtweets looks like an interesting project, but while its tagline is “Fusing Twitter Trends with Bing Insights,” the reality is that it displays a Twitter feed next to Bing’s search results and there is no real fusion between the two.
We do like, however, that Microsoft stressed overall trends on Twitter and allows users to quickly get a grasp on what a trending topic is about. After all, Bing’s results often display information about current news events like the earthquake in New Zealand today, for example. Breaking these trends down by popular terms, people, places, and products is also quite nice, and we are not aware of any other Twitter search engine that currently does this. We also like the ability to share results directly on Twitter through an oversized form at the top of the page.
Overall, this is an interesting effort, though we are not sure that Bingtweets currently offers enough value to differentiate itself from other Twitter search engines and memetrackers like Twazzup or Tweetmeme.
