Bing News Jumps on the Tweet Train
Bing News is now streaming in Twitter results on the search pages sidebar and displaying relevant tweets in the news results. It seems as though they are using tweets from any profile that contain the keyword(s) in the search query. By clicking on the “more updates” link, it will bring you to the social search where you will see the full stream of related tweets.
Breaking down the new Bing News results you’ll find:
- A three-column listing allowing you to see news results by agency, related videos and people in the news.
- Tools for filtering by publish time, category, location, and related searches.
- Most recent headlines, all within minutes of being published.
- Real-time feed widget for updates related to your query.
Bing also has links for adding a news alert or receiving updates via RSS.
Twitter has become a valuable asset for every news delivery business, however the relevancy of tweets in Bing News is only as good as the users on Twitter. If users are spamming a keyword, Bing is not going to catch it.
I would say that this latest from Bing still only scratches the surface of the potential of Twitter. Mobile applications such as Flipboard bring greater usage out of Twitter by crawling links in tweets and extracting images and content from the destination web page. This means more data for users and a more streamlined user experience. It would be good to see Bing experiment with similar features.
Update from Thom Craver:: Added a few details from Bing. Read Bing’s official announcement here.