Microsoft, Twitter team up on real-time data

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 21 (Xinhua) -- Microsoft on Wednesday said it has struck a deal with Twitter which enables real-time data from the micro-blogging service to appear in search results of Bing, the new search engine launched by Microsoft in June.

A Twitter page is displayed on a laptop computer in Los Angeles  Oct. 13, 2009.(Xinhua/Reuters Photo)

Microsoft executives made the announcement at the Web 2.0 Summit held in San Francisco, saying that a partnership with social networking website Facebook will come at a later date.

Microsoft didn't disclose the financial terms of the Twitter deal, which the software giant said is non-exclusive.

With the deal, Microsoft now has access to the "entire public Twitter feed and have a beta of Bing Twitter search," Paul Yiu of the Bing social search team said in a posting on the search engine's blog.

The idea of accessing data in real time has been an elusive goal in the world of search, and the popularity of Twitter provides the best opportunity to address the challenge, Yiu noted.

"Twitter is producing millions of tweets every minute on every subject you can imagine. The power of those tweets as a form of data that can be surfaced in search is enormous," Yiu wrote.