Microsoft Bing and Twitter renewed their real-time search agreement, the companies confirmed. They also alluded to "bigger and better things" in the future.
Twitter and Microsoft's (NASDAQ:MSFT) search engine found a
way to do what Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Twitter could not, agreeing to renew
their deal to integrate tweets in Bing's search engine.
A Twitter spokesperson couched the news via a
faux tweet exchange between Twitter and Bing on Storify, which included this
line: "Search w/o Twitter = old news. You & @MSN are amazing at using
Tweets to make search better & help people stay in the know." The
companies also pledged to "do bigger and better things."
The Twitter spokesperson later confirmed the deal, whose
duration has not been revealed, for eWEEK Sept. 6 but did not disclose terms of
the deal. Microsoft also confirmed the deal for eWEEK but declined to divulge its terms.
At the Web 2.0 Summit in October 2009,
Bing and Twitter two years ago unveiled a deal in which the young search engine
agreed to index Twitter's tweets in its search engine results pages.
The move
gave Twitter prominent placement on its own page in one of the leading search
engines, while Bing got to enjoy traffic spikes from people searching for hot, breaking news and trends.
The Twitter firehose is now integrated in
Bing's Social search
Website, which includes status updates from Facebook.
Twitter enjoyed a
similar arrangement with Google -- also announced at that Web 2.0 Summit -- until July, when they're deal expired
and the companies could not agree on new terms. Google had created its own
real-time search index with Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Quora and other
sources.
"Since October of 2009, we have had an agreement
with Twitter to include their updates in our search results through a special
feed, and that agreement expired on July 2," Google said at the time.
"While we will not have access to this special feed from Twitter,
information on Twitter that's publicly available to our crawlers will still be
searchable and discoverable on Google."
Google Fellow Amit Singhal, who leads the company's
search efforts, said real-time search could return with status updates
from the new Google+ social network.
It is believed, though never confirmed, that Google and
Bing each paid around $30 million for access to Twitter's firehose data feed, through
which hundreds of millions of tweets are funneled each day.
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