BingTweets is a new project from Bing, the new search engine from Microsoft. In true sense it is not a mashup but a mix of twitter search results with bing search results. While the idea is interesting, bing search results are embedded in a ugly frame that looks annoying. Bing already displays tweets in search results from popular twitter user accounts, but this is a separate concept and runs on its own domain.
BingTweets is a product of Microsoft and Federated Media. It shows twitter trending topics classified as popular, people, places and products on top of the page. Twitter search results will end up as a stream of tweets in the sidebar and relevant search results for the trending topic from bing will be shown in the center of the page in a frame. If you want to keep up with the latest trending topics or want to search for something like an event in real-time this is useful as the search results often provide context for what you are searching.
Not only the twitter trending topics but you can search for anything using the search box, twitter and bing search results will be relevant to your query. You can also tweet these results using a big tweet this box or share using other social sites with your friends.
Strangely the bing search results will open in the same frame the results are displayed, I am not a big fan of using frames to display results and some may not like the same.
From Bing Blog
As part of our ongoing efforts to explore options in real-time search, we’ve partnered with Federated Media and Twitter to create BingTweets which fuses Bing search results and real time content from Twitter in an interesting new interface. How does partnering with Twitter make Bing a more effective decision engine? Many people share their thoughts on Twitter, and search engines don’t currently do a great job of capturing that real-time content. We designed Bing to help you make faster, more informed decisions, and, since people often turn to real-time content to help them make decisions, BingTweets was a logical next step.
For example, when Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince comes out tomorrow, you may want to scan the official reviews, local theater listing, AND the latest Tweets on the movie to help you decide whether to rush to see it. With BingTweets, you can cover all that ground in one place.
