Realtime Search
Yesterday at the 2009 Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco Microsoft announced that they have struck a deal with Twitter to stream their realtime data. Once again this thrusts the issue of realtime search into the limelight, as Bing will be utilising the Twitter ‘firehose’ of instantaneous updates.
This made Bing the first search engine to have access to the realtime data and they have opted to set up a separate search tool at bing.com/twitter, which will allow users to specifically search twitter data. It is effectively a rebranded Twitter Search and is purely an immediate response to the deal, however we are currently unable to run any tests on it:
Twitter Search
We expect that the results will be much the same as Twitter Search with incredibly Spammy and irrelevant results. What will be interesting is what they will do with all the trending information and whether or not Retweets and the like will eventually affect SERPS.
By definition, realtime search cannot be indexed in the traditional sense of the word, so how will Bing utilise this new source of information? It is a little early to draw any conclusions however it could be that trends in Retweets, hashtags and keywords could be used to assess popularity which in turn would affect SERPS. The nature of realtime search will mean that indexing will be based on authority, so could favour listings that already have a prominent online profile.
Search Trends
The most likely motive from this move would be to sell paid listings in search. If certain search trends are forming in Twitter this could affect the bidding on certain keywords in paid search. Microsoft also announced a deal with Facebook, however the details of this deal remain vague. It is unclear how Bing plans to utilise Facebook data as Twitter data is publically available, however the default setting of Facebook is private.
It is all rather speculative at the moment and this deal is clearly a foundation to explore how best to utilise the realtime data. The deal is non exclusive and it is expected that Google will follow suit in the near future.
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