Bing puts its game face on, releases real-time search with Bing Tweets

Sometime late last evening, Microsoft launched its latest addition to its Bing decision engine.  Dubbed Bing Tweets, the new destination is a mash up of real-time Twitter search with Bing web results (something Microsoft apparently calls Bing Insights).  Interestingly, the site is a second series of partnerships between Microsoft and Federated Media – the first being ExecTweets.  And while there is a plethora of real-time search engines cropping up (seemingly left and right nowadays), Bing Tweets may be that one place that takes real-time search mainstream.

Bing Tweets is described as combining “Twitter trends with Bing search results, enabling you to see deeper, real-time information about the hottest topics on Twitter. You can also search for anything in the BingTweets search box (at the top right of every page) and see Bing search results alongside the most recent related tweets.”

Design

The design is very attractive, user friendly, and fairly straightforward.  It takes a few seconds and a few clicks to get used to the layout, which consists of five main content areas and one search box.

In the upper right corner, above the four main content areas, Bing Tweets displays a search box.  This is no ordinary search box, since using it will deliver a combination of Tweets along with search results from Bing (the decision engine we’ve all come to love).  Here is a brief description of the five content areas:

Trending topics on Twitter: this is where I anticipate most users will interact with Bing Tweets.  This section currently consists of four main categories: Popular Now, People, Places, and Products.  Clicking one of these categories reveals the appropriate subset of trending topics on Twitter.  A really cool feature here is the ability of trending topics to grow and shrink.  If, for example, the trending topic for the Palm Pre became more popular, the size of the font would grow.  The reverse effect (shrinking) is also true if the trending topic loses its popularity.  Over time, I see the headings being expanded into other categories: politics and sports spring to mind.

The Tweets content area (column) is immediately below the trending topics on Twitter content area.  It displays a self-updating stream of tweets about the trending topic selected in the above content area.  When a user clicks a tweet in this stream, the updates pause for a few seconds and resume again.  Interestingly enough, the tweets displayed here aren’t exactly real-time: in my tests, Bing Tweets first began displaying tweets from a few days ago and upon running out of new tweets to display, the stream stopped moving (I searched for an unpopular topic).  One interesting tidbit is that this stream doesn’t seem to take hash tags into account when displaying tweets.  When I searched for TechNest Report and included #TechNestReport in my tweet, the stream didn’t display my update with the hash tag at all.

Search Results: this is the area of the site that needs the least amount of explaining, since it’s a direct Bing search result, down to the T.  It’s actually an iFrame of the Bing search results page and allows one to scroll left and right outside the intended viewing area.  Perhaps this is why Lizette thought the site was rushed to market: the Bing team could have integrated a real Bing results page and not just an iFrame.

Share this result: this content area is directly to the right of the trending topics on Twitter content area and above the search results content area.  It’s prefilled with the following text by default: “Check out BingTweets about your search query,” (emphasis – mine) followed by a bit.ly URL and a #bing hashtag.  The user has the option to Tweet this or ShareThis.  Tweeting this takes the user directly to his web-based Twitter account and prefills the compose Tweet box.  ShareThis is actually a ShareThis button (the company) which allows the user to email, text, or post the web page to a myriad of social networks.  By using the ShareThis button as opposed to a custom-built social sharing solution, the service may give off the vibe of being rushed to market, although I think only the hardcore tech geeks will notice this.  The ShareThis button is quite common throughout the web, so it actually might decrease the learning curve for mainstream users – increasing the chances that the user has seen and used the button on a different site.  For example, our blog also uses the ShareThis button.

How do you decide? The last content area of the service is located at the bottom of the page.   It asks visitors: “How do you use the Internet to find the answers you need to make faster, more informed decisions?”  The question is followed by an invitation to Share Your Ideas, which – when clicked – takes users to a page with a form that asks to fill out the name, email, title, and idea.  The submit button is preceded by a check box that reads “I have read and agree with the Terms & Conditions of contributing to the White Paper.”  This content area collects the submissions and then divides them into Featured Authors and Recent Ideas.  It’s unclear exactly what the process is that would take a submission from an idea to a featured author spot, but I’m guessing that’s the part that Federated Media takes care of.  Current featured authors include Anita Campbell, Harry McCracken, and Xeni Jardin, among others.

Overall, Microsoft got it right with the user interface.  It’s very easy to use for such a powerful real-time search engine.  My only suggestion for the site would be to unify suggested terms.  If I search for TechNestReport (one word) using the top-most search box in Bing Tweets, the Bing search results content area would present its suggestion: TechNest Report (with a space between Nest and Report).  It would be nice to see the suggestions unified across the entire service.  The site is built using Java components and thus uses absolutely no Flash to display its dynamic effects (read: auto-updating Twitter search).  As such, it is extremely mobile friendly: my Flash-less iPhone displayed the web page without a hitch.

Goals: mainstream or whalestream?

So what’s the target market here?  Currently, real-time search is a popular topic among web geeks and has not yet received the proper attention from mainstream media that it deserves.  Nevertheless, Microsoft has its own battles to fight on the search front.  It currently has two major goals with Bing: increase consumer awareness (brand awareness) which – eventually – should translate to taking search share away from other players.  Bing is doing its own thing on that front and initial reports are showing signs of success.  Bing Tweets might be Microsoft’s second phase of assault on Google, delivering real-time search before the incumbent is – after all – what any underdog would be proud of: beating Google feature-by-feature.  At the present time, Bing Tweets does not display any ads whatsoever, so it seems that the purpose is to drive usage of the service and build awareness of Bing as an innovator and as a viable alternative to the oh-so-popular Google.  That is, until Google releases its own a real-time search product.

Posted in Bing, Business, Google, Marketing, Microsoft