[IRP] Microsoft strikes search deals with Twitter, Facebook

[Katitza Rodriguez]

Microsoft strikes search deals with Twitter, Facebook

http://www.macworld.com/article/143425/2009/10/microsoft_twitter_facebook.html?lsrc=rss_news

   by Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service

Microsoft has reached collaboration agreements with Twitter and  
Facebook to get their members? public status updates and messages  
indexed and presented in useful ways on the Bing search engine.

Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft?s Online Audience  
Business, made the announcement on stage at the Web 2.0 Summit in San  
Francisco.

The partnership with Twitter has it working with Microsoft to optimize  
how Bing crawls and indexes ?tweets.? Microsoft in turn will apply  
search algorithms to the Twitter messages, so that Bing users will not  
only be able to see a real-time feed of ?tweets? but also rank them by  
how relevant they are to their query, Mehdi said.

?This is a big deal we?ve been working on for a long time,? Mehdi said.

To rank ?tweets? by relevance, a feature Microsoft calls ?Best Match,?  
Bing will take into consideration a number of factors, such as who are  
the authors of the messages based on a "social relevance" score Bing  
will assign to them, Mehdi said.

Bing will also evaluate the message?s quality, noticing, for example,  
if it contains a link to an online article or Web page. It will also  
take into consideration how popular the message is by calculating how  
many times it has been ?re-tweeted? by others.

In addition to providing links to Twitter messages, Bing will extract  
the URLs of the pages that the messages are making reference to, so  
that users can go directly to that source of the information.

When providing links to ?tweets? that contain a shortened URL, Bing  
will put in parenthesis the main Web domain of the link, so that users  
know, before clicking, whether it?s a reputable site and thus avoid  
landing in a malicious phishing or malware-laden site.

Bing will also display a tag cloud of the most popular Twitter topics,  
so that users can click on and dive deeper into them.

The Twitter deal is nonexclusive, so Twitter can strike similar  
agreements with other search engines. However, for now, Bing is ahead  
of Google with an optimized search experience for Twitter that is  
already live.

Although Google remains by far the most popular search engine,  
Microsoft is making a big push to improve its position in this market,  
starting with Bing?s launch in May and the broad search deal with  
Yahoo, which is awaiting regulatory approval.

In addition to its core microblogging and social networking features,  
Twitter has emerged as a repository of real-time testimonies on  
whatever is on people?s minds, such as news stories of global  
importance, celebrity gossip and hot-button issues. As such, being  
able to capture, analyze and make sense of Twitter?s stream of posts  
is seen as an important new area in the world of search engines.

?We?re super happy with the Twitter partnership,? said Qi Lu,  
president of Microsoft?s Online Services Division, who was also on  
stage being interviewed by conference moderator Tim O?Reilly. Lu  
declined to disclose financial details of the deal. He also said he  
wasn?t sure on its duration.

Neither Mehdi nor Lu said much about the Facebook arrangement, other  
than to indicate that it will be similar in nature to Twitter?s but  
that it will be implemented at a later date.

It will be interesting to see what shape the Facebook agreement takes,  
considering that Facebook allows individual members to make only basic  
profile information available via search engine results. Facebook has  
indicated it may let members make their profiles open to anyone on the  
Web, including their status updates, but that hasn?t happened yet.

Twitter, on the other hand, is a much more open service and most of  
its users make public their ?tweets,? messages that can?t be longer  
than 140 characters.

Microsoft and Facebook have an existing partnership through which  
Microsoft provides Web search and search ads to Facebook.
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