Microsoft unveils Bing Twitter search today and Google's hurried response is a blog post about how they've "reached an agreement" to include tweets in their search results. Ouch.<p>Microsoft still has some fight in it yet, folks! It's not often that other companies are scrambling to keep up with them these days.
I kind of can't believe that both google and microsoft seem to have given in: We knew for quite some time (document leak this summer) that twitter was trying to make the search engines pay for access, but I would have hoped that Google and MS had more guts to not make such an agreement.<p>There are various reasons for that:<p>1) it sets a bad precedence. Up until now, all (significant) content was accessible to the search engines without barrier and to index the web, aside of general algorithmic improvements, no changes in the way how spiders work were needed.<p>2) I don't see why Twitter should decide who can and who can't access the content I made publically available (by tweeting). This should be open to anybody requiring the data.<p>2) The information in twitter, frankly, does not need to be exposed into Google as it IMHO does not contain enough original information. Twitter is about conversations and links to stuff that is in the search engines anyways and the conversations don't really provide that much added value.<p>3) Twitter gains as much (or even more - see above) from Engines indexing them as the engines gain from being able to index Twitter.<p>And lastly: In all other places of the internet that are indexed by search engines, I as the author can specify whether I want the content I create to be indexed or not (robots.txt, X-No-Archive-Headers and so on).<p>As far as I can see, there is no way to make my conversations not appear in Google or any other place - and yes: Conversations. Tweets are not always real content, but often times just bits and pieces of conversations.<p>In a perfect world:<p>1) there would be a standard on how to feed search engines (or any other interested party) with that content.<p>2) Twitter and other micro blogging services would adhere to said standard<p>3) Twitter and other micro blogging services would allow me as a user to chose whether my insignificant content is archived/indexed or not, preferably per tweet.
Bing.com/twitter is actually pretty cool for topics that have recently been in the news, especially the most shared links. On the other hand, if you search for anything that is not news oriented and is highly commercial, the results are super spammy.
I love that the title of this post rendered well on @ newsycombinator<p><a href="http://twitter.com/newsycombinator/status/5053508006" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/newsycombinator/status/5053508006</a>
Too early to really judge. Let's see how Bing's results from twitter are and then wait for Google.
I think that a success will be how they will mine the results. Today from the search results in twitter-search are pretty lame and useless. If Bing or Google can reduce the noisy ratio an get useful results, then we will have a winner.
Googles idea seems more realistic. To search Twitter we got search.twitter.com. What we need is something organize and filter data in a nice (if you don't mind, rad) way.