Bing and Google in deals with Twitter and Facebook
If you’re a Tweetin, technie nerd like (some of) us, you’ll probaby already know the latest big search engine news from the current Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco:
It is that both Bing and Google announced yesterday that they will soon be including Tweets in their search results. And, what’s more, Bing will soon be including Facebook updates.
More normal earthlings may be wondering what the big deal is about all this. The answer is that Twitter and Facebook provide real time data – information that changes by the minute – whereas the search engines currently take a while to index web pages and show them in their search results.
Should you need to, you can access information about current hot topics straight away. However, it may be worth remembering that, just like other sources on the internet, the information being bandied about may not always be the most reliable as it can come from a wide spectrum of commentators.
From the other side of the internet marketing coin, any Tweets you make will be accessible by a much larger audience than before. And, since Twitter pages can be viewed by anybody without having to be logged in, this provides another potential route to your website.
As yet, it’s unclear as to what format these search tools will take; whether they’ll be included in the main search results or whether there’ll be a seperate Twitter search page to access – much like the separate News and Blogs searches that Google currently has. In addition, it remains to be seen how successful Bing’s inclusion of Facebook status updates will be given that most Facebook updates are not public. It could have implications for the way that users behave on Facebook in the future.
And how did we find all this out? Yes – you guessed it – from our fellow Twitterers.
Tags: Bing, facebook, Google, twitter
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