Google and Bing Race to Search Social Media

Microsoft's Bing and Google's search service are preparing real-time searches of Twitter and Facebook posts. Targeted ads could follow

Angelos Dosoulas

By Olga Kharif and Aaron Ricadela

Google and Microsoft have more than each other to contend with in the lucrative market for Internet advertising. Increasingly, when Web surfers want information online, they're bypassing those rectangular search boxes on the home pages of Google (GOOG) and Microsoft's (MSFT) Bing and getting it instead from places where they already spend lots of time: social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

In a bid to stay relevant in the face of these shifts, Google and Microsoft said on Oct. 21 that they will incorporate information culled from social media sites into search pages. Microsoft said its Bing search engine will let users search for Twitter posts known as tweets and, later, for status updates posted to Facebook pages. The same day, Google said it too will include Twitter updates in search results and that it will begin offering a social search tool that delivers information posted by a searcher's friends on social sites.

Online advertising is an attractive market, but the search market has been getting more crowded as Internet users clamor for new ways to sort through data online and many people turn to their online social or professional circles for answers to questions previously reserved for traditional online searches.

Traffic to U.S. search engines grew 15% in the past year, according to consulting firm Hitwise. At the same time, traffic to microblogging site Twitter surged more than tenfold in the past year, while Facebook's traffic almost tripled. "It's a very competitive market, and the search engines are trying to keep the eyeballs on their sites," says Clayton Moran, an analyst at the Benchmark Co.

Google Would Search Friends' Comments

Twitter search is available in a test mode on Bing and will be introduced on Google in the coming months. The new Bing and Google services will index all public Twitter streams, and let users search for tweets on a specific topic right from the main search site. The idea for Google and Bing is to have people follow tweets and friends' status updates directly from Google.com and Bing.com, respectively, without having to log into Twitter or Facebook as often.

Similarly, Google's social search tool would let a user see how friends and acquaintances respond to a search query. Google Vice-President of Search Product & User Experience Marissa Mayer unveiled the social search features at the annual Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, although she didn't say which networks would be included.

Microsoft and Google are morphing their search engines into launch pads for a broader array of tasks users want to accomplish on the Internet, from buying music and shopping for consumer goods to keeping current on conversations about products, people, and news events happening on social networks. The savviest Web users increasingly want to tap into the real-time conversations happening on those networks when they peruse the Web.

Microsoft is introducing Bing's social media features in phases. On Oct. 21, it launched a Web site at bing.com/twitter that lets users type in keywords, or special tags representing users or topics, and see public Twitter messages as they stream into Twitter's own system. Microsoft filters those messages to make posts from highly connected users rise to the top, and to favor tweets that link to credible sources on the Web, said Yusuf Mehdi, a Microsoft senior vice-president, at the Web 2.0 conference.

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