Microsoft Bing’s Twitter search capabilities overblown

A hot topic that has been getting some attention lately is around one of the touted features of Bing, its Twitter search capability. Microsoft has been bragging that Bing is capable of indexing Twitter updates in real time. However, Bing’s Twitter search capability may have been a bit overblown by the press.

Recently, several sites ran stories declaring that Microsoft’s latest search engine iteration, Bing has “one upped” Google to the market with the capability to index tweets. However, according to PC World, these claims may be too good to be true.

According to Microsoft, Bing only indexes tweets from a small pool of “prominent and prolific Twitterers.” In other words, the search functionality does not work on obscure and unknown posters. It is curious as to why Microsoft decided to pool from a small list of posters as search relevance would be constrained by it.

Also, according to PC World, Bing’s Twitter search may be fine at indexing names of the prominent posters, but it falls apart with relevance when searching by keywords tied to the poster. This is a bit disappointing as searching by keywords would arguably be one of the most useful features of indexing Twitter.

Apparently Google seems to do a better job of searching relevant tweets than Bing. Also, Google is said to be better at indexing Twitter searches from all users regardless of the notoriety of the poster.

I am glad to see search engines take an active role in integrating search with Twitter. However, at this point it is difficult to clearly state that one engine has “one upped” another.

Companies may want to further evaluate what is the best search strategy to implement as well. There have been some questions raised as to the usefulness of Twitter search capabilities if all it does is list the tweets that can be seen from the source location anyway.

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