Posts Tagged ‘Google’

Yesterday was something of a roller coaster ride for tech journalists as they attempted to keep up with the latest news from Silicon Valley. In late afternoon UK time Microsoft announced what appeared to be a massive coup by stating that it had agreed a deal with Twitter to enable real time micro blogging searches on its Bing website.

Yet later that night just as the many – has Microsoft finally stole a march on its rivals? – features  were being published  Google announced that it too had agreed a deal with Twitter.

The main differences between the two deals are that the Microsoft will also include Facebook updates  in its searches and more importantly it has a beta site in place already. It is excepted to be weeks or even months before the Google Twitter site is live.

In the short term at least it is fantastic shot in the arm for the Bing search engine which, since its launch three months ago, has clawed its way to now boasting around 15% of US search engine traffic. It is a lot less in the Google-obsessed  UK.

The bad news for Brits is that while they can see the Bing site at the moment they can’t actually use it to search Twitter. The site has a tag cloud which shows trending topics in the UK – last night’s football means that Manchester United and Chelsea get a place as does Windows 7 and the latest Blackberry smartphone – but when users try and click on the words or search for another topic they get a message saying that ‘results are currently unavailable.’

The deals have huge implications for all three companies, though as Duncan Reilly in the popular US tech blog Inquisitr points out this morning – the real winner is us. Twitter will get a much needed injection of cash but Microsoft and Google will be able to offer much more advanced real time searches.

We will have to wait and see how Google powers the searches but the Bing site works in a very interesting way. In presenting search results it bears a couple of core things in mind, such as the length and quality of the tweet (‘I’m asleep’ won’t rate very highly, but a statement about a brand is likely to pop up much higher). More importantly tweeters with a large number of followers will appear higher up the list just as more popular news sites and blogs do in traditional searches.

So how will this impact on brands

1 The Bing and Google sites will be a hugely useful tool for brands who want to track online discussions of their launches and events. Marketeers can of course track tweets using searches on the Twitter home page. There are also other Twitter search and evaluation tools like Monitter which are available. What the Bing and Google deals do is to make it easy and simple for people working for brands to search using sites and technology they are comfortable with. So for example if a brand has a launch event it can watch in real time how its product is being tweeted about via Twitter but also keep an eye on what influential Twitter users are staying via Bing and Google.

2 It will lead to a renewed interest in brands engaging with Twitter. Put simply brands really can’t afford not to get involved with micro blogging now. Or else they could find that the main source of information on their brand is a person with many followers who has a negative view of the brand. I do think we will continue to see the rise of Twitter experts, kind of like SEO gurus, who offer brands instant ways of creating large Twitter empires. If Bing rates tweets on the popularity of the tweeters rather than the calibre of their followers (they could all be spam Twitter accounts for example) then this could be an option less savvy brands could follow. Far better though for brands to have some serious engagement with their audience via Twitter by using the micro blogging format to track what users are saying and then to engage too.

3 It will change how mainstream media companies approach Twitter. It will be imperative for companies to maintain huge Twitter audiences to ensure that they get as much traffic as possible via links from the new search engine sites. The Twitter sites could emerge as a serious rival to Google News as media companies  vie to be at top of the Twitter search tree and get the their news out to the world fastest.

Of course Google may take a completely different approach to ranking tweets and tweeters which again could have a very interesting influence. The next few months are going to be fascinating.