Qi Lu said that Microsoft was in talks with Twitter to introduce real time search on Bing.

The new features due to be Launched have been labeled ‘Bing Wave 2’.

He also provided a demo of what the new search results would look like. Apparently the new service will incorporate the best features of both Bing and Twitter.

Microsoft will now have access to all of Twitter’s public feeds, and so, when a user conducts a Twitter search on Bing, they will not only see the most recent tweets and top links, but they will also have the various search features of Bing. The most recent tweets of Twitter will be constantly updated in real-time on Bing. The results will also have a retweet button, so it will be very easy for users to forward the tweets if they wish to.

Although the financial details of the deal have not been disclosed, Qi Lu did admit that this would be a non-exclusive deal, thus fuelling the rumors that Twitter is in talks with Google for a similar deal.

Bing will be able to use Twitter content and will keep track of the number of followers to each tweet, in order to determine the quality and ranking of each tweet. Spam will of course be filtered. Tags will be used to identify the trending topics and Bing will also provide the shortened URL as well as the final URL of the topic.

There has been speculation about similar deals between Bing and Facebook but nothing
has been confirmed on that score as yet.

Google claim that this new engine has been in the works for several months now and has nothing to with the launch of Bing by Microsoft. The claim is quite believable as it would hardly be possible to put together a new search engine in a matter of weeks.

Google has now released a developer’s preview of this new search engine to get user feedback in order to fine tune the product before the final launch.

This new version has been labeled ‘Caffeine’:

Search using Google Caffeine

Google has claimed that this new version of their search engine will be faster, more accurate and more comprehensive than before, even though the appearance of the search results page will continue to be the same as that of the old search results page. This improvement will be due to several technical changes which have been incorporated. The results will also be indexed in real-time, as the search engines of Twitter and Facebook are.

While they claim that the newer version is much faster than the older one, the actual difference in time will only be in fractions of a second, which will make no real difference to the average user, as he is hardly likely to actually measure whether the time taken to generate the results is 0.1 second or 0.2 seconds.

As far as accuracy and comprehensiveness are concerned, these are very subjective terms and so they may vary from search to search. While the new Google may provide better results for some searches, the older version may be better for others and indeed Bing may be better for yet others.

Whatever the changes may be, competition between search engines is certainly good for the user.

Twitter users often look up the latest or trending topics at a particular time, as indicated in the right-hand column when logged in on Twitter. Then, in order to find out more about the topic, users have to query a search engine to get the latest news, presumably from more reliable sources.

BingTweets eliminates the need for users to go to another site for the search process.

Rather than adding the functionality to Bing.com, Microsoft has chosen to launch a new site, BingTweets.com, which automatically provides search results for topics currently trending on Twitter.

Users can now go directly to BingTweets.com and check out what the trending topics are at that point of time and get search results for those topics on the same page.

When a user on BingTweets clicks on one of the trending topics, its search results are provided alongside without having to click further or load a new page. In fact, even the website that is linked to within the search results loads within the same frame, allowing users to stay within BingTweets, without needing to leave it to get details on any interesting topics.

Another interesting feature of BingTweets is a ‘Share This’ option, which allows users to tweet or email the search results to their contacts. In fact, users can even post them on various other social networking sites via the Share This tool.

If such innovations continue, it looks as though Microsoft may really be able to make some in-roads in the search market, which has so far been dominated by Google.

Update:

The screenshot below shows BingTweets in action.