Infinite Path

When Twitter and Google had something of a falling out in July, it was perhaps inevitable the microblogging site would look to strengthen its relationship with other search engines with Bing the most likely suitor. Now, in a slightly flirtatious series of tweets, the pair have confirmed a closer partnership is indeed the way of the future. With @Twitter suggesting they “stick together and do bigger and better things” and @Bing replying it “can’t wait for what comes next” it seems changes are on the way.

Which is just as well because even though the exchange saw Bing praised for “using tweets to make search better” things seem very basic right now. I struggled to get any tweets to appear following a Bing search, and in order to get those I had to look for results on “@Twitter” and “@Bing”. By way of a further experiment, I decided to look for one of the microblogging site’s most popular and prolific users, but a search for “@Stephenfry” led Bing to ask if I’d meant “@Stephen Fry”. Not particularly useful.

When this is compared to the way in which Google used to display tweets, offering as it did realtime updates on queries at the top of the results page (and plenty of them to), it’s easy to see just how far Bing has to go in order to truly make tweets part of its search experience. Of course, it had there been a major breaking news story at the time of my limited test things may have been different, but it doesn’t seem likely.

One also has to ask what both parties expect to gain from a stronger partnership. The exposure Twitter gained through Google would have helped boost the number of people signing up for the social network, but Bing has a significantly smaller user base. Furthermore, with Twitter growing in popularity, it is now many people’s first port of call for breaking news. Take the recent London riots where a number of journalists who were actually reporting on events used Twitter to keep the public up to date. Personally, I followed events via a few trustworthy accounts on the microblogging site using a Twitter client on my mobile, the Guardian and BBC’s live blogs, radio and TV. I didn’t once put the phrase “London riots” into a search engine because there was a quicker and easier way to access information.

Ultimately, it’s not hard to see Twitter making realtime search obsolete. Who wants to log on to a PC in order to use a search engine, or faff on with the mobile equivalent, and then wade through results when, if you’re following the right people, Twitter will present the information to you with nothing more than a quick refresh? With this in mind, the value of joining forces with a search engine is, in the long term, questionable.

For this reason, the stronger partnership between Bing and Twitter cannot merely focus on displaying tweets on search engine results pages, they also need to look at seamlessly integrating them into mobile search and perhaps even try offering smartphone users something completely new in order to grab a bigger slice of this vastly important emerging market. Sadly, given that the pair appear to be starting from such a poor position, it’s hard to see them coming up with anything even remotely approaching revolutionary.