Bing Tries to Bring Relevancy Factor to Real-Time Search
As previously reported, Microsoft has made deals with both Facebook and Twitter, which will see Bing feature updates from both networks in real-time search efforts. To me, this says that social media just became an even bigger part of search engine marketing, particularly with Google also on board with Twitter and rumored to be talking to Facebook.
Bing has already made a beta version of its Twitter search available to users at bing.com/twitter. The most interesting aspect of Bing’s Twitter search is that it offers something plain old Twitter Search (formerly Summize) doesn’t. That is a relevancy factor (or at least an attempted relevancy factor).
Twitter Search only shows you results displayed chronologically, which has really always seemed to be the essence of real-time search to me anyway. But Bing has a “Best Match” option, which attempts to give certain tweets more weight than others.
How do you put relevancy on “real-time” results though? “Real-time” is based on time (obviously). The phrase even has the word “time” in it. A search for “WebProNews” on Bing’s Twitter Search gives me different results for “most recent” and for “best match”. I can’t see that the “best match” results are any better than the “most recent” results, however.