Microsoft on Wednesday began integrating Twitter messages into its new Internet search engine, Bing, while rival Google announced plans to do the same.
Microsoft unveiled its real-time Twitter search feature at a Web 2.0 Summit and said it planned to incorporate status updates from social network Facebook into Bing.
Within hours of the announcement by the US software giant, search leader Google said it too had reached an agreement with the popular microblogging service to include Twitter updates in search results.
The Twitter feature on Bing is already active and can be accessed at bing.com/twitter, while Google said it would roll out its product “in the coming months.”
“We have a deal with Twitter,” Google vice president of search products Marissa Mayer said at the summit. “We will be featuring tweets in our search results as well as building a real-time search.”
Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft’s online services group, demonstrated a Bing Twitter search feature that went live on Wednesday.
“We are going to get access to all of the public Twitter information in real time,” Mehdi said, adding that the Facebook status feed will be introduced at a later date.
“We are giving Bing a feed of data made open to everyone,” Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg said at the summit. “No money exchanged hands. We are not trying to make money on data.”
Neither Microsoft nor Facebook specified when Bing would begin delivering status updates from the Palo Alto, California-based social networking service.
“This is just a start,” said Qi Lu (陸奇), president of Microsoft’s online services group. Google and Microsoft each declined to discuss financial terms of the deals.
Because of a freshly inked deal with Microsoft, Yahoo also expects to be able to deliver Twitter and Facebook updates on its Web pages, Yahoo chief technology officer Aristotle Balogh said at the summit.
“Whatever they get, we get,” Balogh said, referring to Bing being used to deliver search results to Yahoo Web sites.
Twitter and Facebook search features promise to be a boost for Bing, which has made steady if unspectacular progress in wresting a bigger share of the lucrative search and advertising market away from Google.
Not to be outdone, Mayer used the summit stage to demonstrate a “social search” feature to launch at its Labs Web site in “a couple of weeks.”
The “beta,” or test, service goes beyond Twitter feeds to incorporate in search results pictures, comments and other content from people’s online social networks.
“We have inserted on the bottom of the page content by people in your social network,” Mayer said while demonstrating.
To dabble with the social search feature people will have to “opt-in” at Google Labs.
Google remains the Internet search king, commanding approximately 65 percent of the US market.
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