Bing Indexes Popular Twitter Profiles
By: Erik Medrano [@erikmed]
On July 1st 2009, Microsoft's Bing community blog announced that a few thousand twitter profiles will be searchable on their latest search engine. The development is crucial to Bing's growth and popularity, as Microsoft beat Google and Yahoo to surfacing twitter profiles in this manner.
Unlike the exclusive contract Apple has with AT&T to monopolize the iPhone, Twitter has opened their API (Application Programing Interface) to the public. Any search engine could have capitalized on this development, making Bing's accomplishments a bit less honored, but the feature works and is indeed the first.
As promised after entering a Bing search field with “@cnnbrk”, Bing delivered the profile of CNN's twitter page at the top of the page, along with CNN's two latest tweet updates and three links taking users to the CNN twitter home page.
“We’re not indexing all of Twitter at this time… just a small set of prominent and prolific Twitterers to start. We picked a few thousand people to start, based primarily on their follower count and volume of tweets.” Microsoft Bing community blog
Impressive, but will this development pay off? In fact, all of Bing's efforts were questionable after the June 5th launch not to mention the enormous campaign ad produced by agency JWT at a reported cost of over $90 million.
Microsoft's efforts to keep Bing rolling past Google will with out a doubt reward search users. More reason to keep the lovely free market economy we have doing what it's suppose to do: forcing competition and bringing out the best product.
