Bing adds tweets from prominent tweeters to its results | Hacker News Reader

Bing adds tweets from prominent tweeters to its results

techcrunch.com

11 pointsanirudh13 comments

Brilliant. Whenever you're willing to do something your competitors won't there's a huge opportunity.

Maybe I just read too much Seth Godin, but I think this is huge.

That's a brilliant quote.

So perhaps it's a prototype, or somehow due to api limits, but why can't they add all tweets to their results? Number of followers provides a natural ranking mechanism.

I think you put a little too much weight in follower count. There are a lot of methods to drive up your follower count (following big names, finding accounts that auto follow back, etc). If your followers aren't people that actually chose to follow you because you provide some value, what good is your number in determining importance?

Follower count is the only mechanism that Twitter provides for determining worth -- misguided or not. With some sort of tweet-ranking (everyone's doing it these days), perhaps there would be a better way to determine "prominence". -m

Maybe I misunderstood, but Google is indexing tweets.

This almost feels "desparate" by Microsoft. Keep throwing stuff at Bing until it ... what, hits some magic "we love it!" threshold?

I disagree. Normally, yes, MS seems desperate, however, I think realtime search is really needed, and this is going to be seen as an important development looking back 24 months from now.

Out of curiosity, I've been trying Bing out for a few weeks. It doesn't feel desperate at all; incredibly, it's actually good. And I've been surprised at how much I enjoy its well-chosen and often beautiful pictures of the day---as with (restricted) Twitter results, a tiny differentiator vs. Google, but I suspect an important one.

MSFT might, just might, not be quite as dead as we thought.

I second that. I've had bing on my work computer for the last several weeks, and google at home. I haven't missed google on my work computer. And I think the UI for bing is pretty slick; you hover over a link and see a preview.

A couple of times, I didn't find something in bing, switched back to google.... and couldn't find it either. So I guess you could say that, provisionally, I'm sold.

A couple of times, I didn't find something in bing, switched back to google.... and couldn't find it either.

That matches my experience as well.

hey it works, before bing I used to go to yahoo as my 2nd search engine, now I go to bing.

It hasn't found any better results than Google yet, but the interface etc, makes it much more useful than Yahoo.

I don't see any search engine replacing Google for me though, its just too ingrained in me. And then there is the firefox aspect, where my first search pretty much goes to Google by default

Also known in startup circles as "release early and iterate"?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com