Mike Posted October 22, 2009 Report Share Posted October 22, 2009 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. 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, and hours later rival Google announced its own agreement with Twitter. Copyright 2009 IDG Magazines Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Seeker Posted October 22, 2009 Report Share Posted October 22, 2009 I don't really know what to think. Twitter IS a whole lot faster than any news site out there, but Facebook statuses? Plus I'm not sure I want any random stranger's opinion of my search terms, so that quality filter had better work. And of course I don't want any of MY updates on google or bing Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mike Posted October 22, 2009 Author Report Share Posted October 22, 2009 And of course I don't want any of MY updates on google or bing You would first have to post them as "public" before they would appear. Privacy settings will continue to allow you control over accessible information to the public. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Levis Posted October 23, 2009 Report Share Posted October 23, 2009 Don't know about that. At the moment private Twitter updates can be reached by searchbots so you can see a person's protected updates via google. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Seeker Posted October 23, 2009 Report Share Posted October 23, 2009 No, google indexes only tweets from before an account was made private. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Levis Posted October 23, 2009 Report Share Posted October 23, 2009 Really?I though that was just Twitter - What was Pete Cashmore on about then? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Seeker Posted October 23, 2009 Report Share Posted October 23, 2009 They got it from the LA Times... and mashable now updated their article saying "Update: There are reports that Google bots don’t crawl private accounts, but tweets from accounts before they were privatized. We are checking with Twitter to see if this is accurate." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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