Follow Search on Twitter

Lots of search engine deals with Twitter this past week, first Bing, then Google.  I like Adam Ostrow’s comment at Mashable about how these deals validate Twitter’s model:  With a fresh $100 million in the bank and both Google and Microsoft implementing tweets in search, it looks like Twitter is in it for the long haul.

First, there’s Bing.  Bing Twitter is Microsoft’s take on the up to the second data stream of tweets.  It would simply be another Twitter search, except Bing has analyzed the data stream to eliminate a lot of redundant tweets, and you can select a ‘best match’ option rather than the default ‘latest’ post option to try to boost relevancy. Bing also gives you two sets of results, first the most recent tweets themselves in chrono order, and then the most popular links within tweets.

Bing says they evaluate the authority of tweets by looking at the number of followers of the post plus the retweet pattern.  This is a beta release, so it isn’t always right on target, but it’s an interesting addition to the ever-growing world of search.

I think it helps a lot with some of the kinds of searches I might do, like reputation management for a customer.  For a really thorough and typically good treatment of this, see Danny Sullivan’s post at Search Engine Land.

Then Google makes a splashy announcement almost within a day that it has reached an agreement with Twitter to use its data in real time search results.  Google hasn’t yet rolled out how it will integrate that data into search results — might be a separate index, like Microsoft — but I think it will  have some kind of user option built into it, probably in the ‘show options’ like you have for blogs, video and so forth.  Then again, that’s probably way too easy for Google.  What will they think of next?

On that note, there’s Danny Sullivan again, this time gushing about Google Social Search:  I don’t see a lot of things that make me go “wow,” that’s useful. This did.

Google has yet another beta product here (and I do not know where in the world they get the ideas for all the stuff they roll out, but they are busy!).  The basic idea of Google Social Search is to extend the personalization of your search results by linking them to your networks of friends.

To make it work, you need a Profile set up on your Google account.  On that profile, if you list your social network accounts (especially Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn — aka the big 3), Google will recognize them and — to the extent they are visible — filter your search results through your friends.  Somehow.  I haven’t seen it done yet, but I’m looking forward to it!