.gif)
Microsoft on Wednesday began integrating Twitter messages into its new online search engine Bing and announced plans to do the same with Facebook status updates.
Real-time comments from the popular microblogging service and the leading social-networking community will be included with Bing query results, said Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft's online services group.
"We are bringing the best of real-time right inside search results," Mehdi said while demonstrating the feature on stage at a Web 2.0 Summit here. "We are going to get access to all of the public Twitter information in real time."
The Twitter feature is active and can be accessed at bing.com/twitter. The Facebook status feed will be introduced at a later date, Mehdi said.
"This is just a start," said Qi Lu, president of Microsoft's online services group. He declined to discuss financial terms of the deals with Twitter and Facebook but said "I think there are going to be a lot more partnerships."
The deals are not exclusive, leaving Twitter and Facebook free to collaborate with Microsoft's arch rival Google.
Due to 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 told AFP at the summit.
"Whatever they get, we get," Balogh said, referring to Bing being relied on to deliver search results to Yahoo! websites.
Effectively searching real-time commentary fired about the Internet has been "an elusive goal," Paul Yiu of the Bing social search team said in a blog post detailing the search engine's tweet search feature.
"Twitter is producing millions of tweets every minute on every subject you can imagine," Yiu said. "Search needs to keep up."
Bing engineers began collaborating with Twitter shortly after Microsoft launched its new search engine about five months ago.
"You can now search for what people are saying all over the Web about breaking news topics, your favorite celebrity, hometown sports team, and anything else you use Twitter to stay on top of today," Yiu said.
Bing's Twitter search delivers lists of "tweets" related to topics typed into a search box.
It ranks tweets by relevance, taking into account factors such as the author, content, and how many times comments are "re-tweeted" by others.
A tweet captioned "Life sucks" may be "interesting but not that valuable" while a missive containing a link to a news story gets higher relevance, according to Lu.
If someone has legions of followers, their tweets may get higher ranking. However, if particular tweets simply echo other microblogged comments they sink in the rankings.
Bing searches can also be done by the "hashtags" used to group Twitter messages.
Protected or deleted tweets don not get presented in Bing search results, which will keep comments indexed for no more than seven days, according to Yiu.
Facebook status messages intended to be public -- instead of just viewed by freinds -- are expected to be integrated into Bing.
Twitter and Facebook search features promise to be a boost for Bing, which has made steady if unspectacular progress in a bid to wrest a bigger share of the lucrative search and advertising market away from Google.
Bing increased its share of the US search market to 9.4 percent in September from 9.3 percent in August, according to figures from online tracking firm comScore.
It was the fourth month in a row of modest gains for Bing, which the Redmond, Washington-based software giant unveiled in late May accompanied by a 100-million-dollar advertising campaign.
Google, meanwhile, increased its share of the US search market to 64.9 percent in September from 64.6 percent in August, comScore said.
Yahoo! saw its market share fall half-a-point to 18.8 percent in September.
