Microsoft starts officially tweeting in Bing search results

BEIJING, July 2 (Xinhuanet) -- It's Twitter day at Microsoft as the company announced that it would start adding tweets to its Bing search results Thursday.　

It's Twitter day at Microsoft as the company announced that  it would start adding tweets to its Bing search results  Thursday. (File photo)

Bing is a solid product. Apparently, Bing will update these Twitter results every minute. But it’s important to note that Bing will not be crawling every tweet that runs through Twitter. Instead, it will focus on only those from people it deems important based on follower counts and volume of tweets.

What else is a bit odd about Bing’s addition of tweets is that apparently they’ll only show up for very specific searches. So, for example, if you search for “Janny Jackson tweets” you’ll find them in the results, but presumably you won't if you just search for “Janny Jackson.”

Google has been doing things in recent months such as adding Google profiles and Facebook profiles prominently in search results. But so far it has shied away from highlighting tweets in their results. Even if these tweet results are rather pointless, this will be seen as Bing doing something Google cannot. And that may just give a few more people a reason to use Bing.

Microsoft is using the main/microsoft account to tweet. The account is being run by its corporate communications team, consisting of four people. So far there have been only 2 tweets and the account only has about 1,000 people following it.

There's probably not much to read into Microsoft's love-fest with Twitter today, but you never know. After all, rivals have been snooping around, flirting with the service.