Microsoft's Bing and Google's search service are preparing real-time searches of Twitter and Facebook posts. Targeted ads could follow.
Google and Microsoft have more than each other to contend with in the lucrative market for Internet advertising. Increasingly, when Web surfers want information online, they're bypassing those rectangular search boxes on the home pages of Google and Microsoft's Bing and getting it instead from places where they already spend lots of time: social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.
In a bid to stay relevant in the face of these shifts, Google and Microsoft said on Oct. 21 that they will incorporate information culled from social media sites into search pages. Microsoft said its Bing search engine will let users search for Twitter posts known as tweets and, later, for status updates posted to Facebook pages. The same day, Google said it too will include Twitter updates in search results and that it will begin offering a social search tool that delivers information posted by a searcher's friends on social sites.
Full article:
Google and Bing Race to Search Social Media - BusinessWeek
Ok, so the face of search has changed for good, I wonder if this instant access information will dilute search result quality, or improve it? Maybe this is the dawn of realtime spam, or we will finally start seeing those 10 year old web pages getting dropped from the index, as fresh content arrives in force!
What does anybody else think?
