Today, Bing and Google announced that they have set an agreement with Twitter to do integrated search. This means you can see Twitter updates on both Bing and Google search pages.
And mind you, these are real-time search from all Twitter updates.
Microsoft came out first with the announcement and has already implemented the search via http://bing.com/twitter:
However, upon inspection, the Twitter search on Bing doesn’t seen to be working. Now, that’s an epic fail on launch date.
On the other hand, Google’s announcement of the Twitter search integration is just an announcement. No specific date when this will be implemented and how the integration will be done.
So, why would Twitter want to give the search data to Bing and Google when they can do it on their own (which they’ve been actually doing already):
- Computing Power – search requires a huge amount of computing power (just ask administrators of very large forums on how their internal search is choking the servers). Google and Microsoft already has that technology so it spares Twitter from spending more on servers.
- Search Discovery – Twitter is already mainstream but it looks like its growth has plateaued (stagnant) for the last 3 months (according to Compete). Getting more traffic from search engines could help boost its growth.
- Monetization – Twitter could be developing a much better API and selling it as a premium to 3rd parties like Google and Microsoft. The search engines, in turn, can monetize the search traffic. It’s a win-win deal.
This is great news, I’m for it, everything for the advancement of technology, but who would go to bing just to look for somebody on Twitter, I’d rather just go directly to Twitter and look for that person there.