This should keep folks talking about Microsoft a lot more after Mac Tuesday’s drooling annoucements!
        

Will Bing Replace Twitter Search?

Today, Bing will integrate Twitter and Facebook status updates into their search services. Essentially, all of your updates will be available for public consumption like never before. This has the opportunity to propel your voice into the stratosphere of new outlets. Yet, pose some privacy and security concerns all in the same breath.

If you head to http://bing.com/twitter you’ll notice a tag cloud of trending twitter topics along with shared links of the trending topics. Type in a search query get the most recent Twitter results, or sort them by Best Match by viewing more tweets for your query.

Twitter Trends On Bing
   

How Important Are Social Media Search Results?

Is social media important to search? For me, it’s become necessary for the majority of my search queries as of lately. I start off in Google with some things, and move over to Twitter. Often times, I find my questions getting answered more quickly through Twitter. How many times do you find yourself heading to search.twitter.com in a day? Now think about how many times you’ve skipped out on going to your default search engine, by using Twitter’s search?

On the other hand, there are just as many cases where Twitter is useless as opinions and rumors flood out facts. This is especially prevalent within breaking news stories. In the end, I think there’s something nice about searching for the facts on bigger news outlets, and also receiving the enlightening truth of what communities have to say about what news outlets are covering. Sometimes, they know a lot more.
    

Bing’s Twitter Search Results
      
         

8 Questions To Ask Yourself

• Would incorporating them make an overall difference in the search results you’re seeking today?
• Would it make searching easier for you? Will you get the answers you need faster via real-time updates?
• Will it truly feel personalized or will it tweets and status updates begin to look more and more like…well…search results and not people’s genuine opinions?
• Is this enough to make you start using Bing as your default search engine?
• Will this push Bing into a more real-time search engine or another aggregator?
• How important and successful will this move prove to be for Microsoft?
• Are social media properties like Twitter and Facebook big enough to move Bing above or closer to Google’s number #1 search engine ranking?