Google to Bing: We (Will) Have Tweets Too!
Following yesterday’s announcement from Microsoft that its Bing search engine is now including Twitter updates in its search results, Google’s Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, posted to The Official Google Blog stating:
Given this new type of information and its value to search, we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results.
Mayer goes on to say that “in the coming months” Google plans to have a product that includes tweets in search results. If it hadn’t been for Microsoft’s Twitter-integration announcement I doubt that Mayer’s blog post would even exist.
Here’s my (humble) advice to Bing:
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- Make your Twitter search as user-friendly as possible, now.
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- Thoroughly integrate tweets into your search results, now. Ditch the http://www.bing.com/twitter/ red-headed step-child domain and start listing tweets in your main search results. Or at least give users an easy option to include (or remove) tweets in their search results.
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- Make your Twitter search results better than the results at http://search.twitter.com. If I’m searching for a company or person give me a link to their Twitter profile at the top, followed by their last few tweets and tweets that reference them.
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- Develop an algorithm that places less importance on tweets of little value (if this is even possible).
- Pray Google doesn’t get a user-friendly Twitter search tool working before you do.
But kudos to Bing for making a deal with Twitter first and getting its Twitter search tool up and running before the search market leader did.
Image Credit: Twitter Bird Icon
