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Comment by mrshoe | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft unveils Bing Twitter search today and Google's hurried response is a blog post about how they've "reached an agreement" to include tweets in their search results. Ouch.

Microsoft still has some fight in it yet, folks! It's not often that other companies are scrambling to keep up with them these days.

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I think only the announcement is hurried, I'm sure this has been in the works longer.

The first company to release the feature won't matter much in the end, it's all about implementation and market share..

So I wouldn't call it "scrambling", more just a "why yes, we've thought of this too, and we're working on it"..

Agreed. This looks like an embarrassingly reactive move.

It's better to do something properly than be first to market. Better to think through exactly how best to present the information to the users.

http://bing.com/twitter is pretty ugly, and seems to not be working currently.

And when I do a regular Bing search for, say, "ac milan," I'm not getting any real-time information, twitter-based or otherwise. Going to bing.com/twitter doesn't seem to be an improvement over just going to twitter.com to run my real-time search.

Searching "ac milan" on Google does at least bring up their last Serie A result and a news story about how they came from behind to beat Madrid this afternoon. I'm pretty sure Google will find a good way to integrate real-time tweets and status updates into its regular search results.

http://search.trendistic.com/ac-milan

Or if you prefer a chart

http://trendistic.com/milan/_24-hours

I doubt this battle will be settled (or even affected) by the fact that MS was first to market with this feature.

Who has the better integration and implementation is far more interesting.

Google wasn't the first search engine, either.

Neither Bing. Whatever that means.

The point's been better made elsewhere in the thread by now, but: what I mean is Google's always been a "best to market" company (to borrow a phrase from a friend) more than a "first to market" company. That certainly holds true for search itself, anyway; there are lots of exceptions within Google I can think of, but not lots that have been successful.

I will not compare Google and Microsoft, but Microsoft has a long tradition of "coming late to the party and remain the last man standing" i.e. Google has a reason to worry in the long term if Microsoft decided to take search seriously.

Did you try using Bing? I got: Twitter search results are currently unavailable.

Not working for either. As many others I think that both (MS and Google) tried to win the other with lame PR and a broken application. The result is embarrassing for both.

"[...] look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months." -GoogleBlog

In other words, Google has yet to release an unpolished product, unlike MS who released what is already better done on Twitter itself.

>> "scrambling to keep up with them these days."

huh? Both announced they were going to use twitter data :/

It all depends who presents that information in a useful way - my money is on google reading their blog post. I hardly think google are 'scrambling to keep up with them'.

http://www.bing.com/twitter

You're right that it still remains to be seen who puts the data to better use in the long term, though.

FWIW that page looks absolutely horrible. I'd be ashamed if I had produced that. Being first to market is good, as long as the product doesn't make people recoil in horror.

>> "Twitter search results are currently unavailable."

Presumably it's not live yet, or else broken.

Same for me, wonder why that got you modded down.

First to market is worth something, if you actually have a product. If you're only first to market with an announcement and an empty page you make yourself look a little foolish to jump the gun like that.

I'm reasonably sure that when google announces their twitter search that it will at least work.

Time will tell though.

Perhaps it's more telling that Bing thought they had one up on Google, only to find out that Google was already there.

That's an interesting way to spin it in Google's favor, but:

1) When MS signed a non-exclusive agreement with Twitter, they must have been 99% sure that Google would be in on the Twitter action as well (i.e. I doubt they ever thought they were one up on Google), and

2) The point is that Google is not already there. All they have to show for themselves is an agreement so far. (MS has http://www.bing.com/twitter up and running already.)

Being first to market isn't everything, but I still think this is a noteworthy exception to the norm of recent years.

Being first to market is fine if it works. If you actually search for anything at all you get an error page.

Wow, everyone's signed non-exclusive agreements, no one's shipped anything stable... it's almost as if there's nothing to discuss.

This Microsoft Google war is incredible

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