Bing Carries Results from Twitter

Apparently, Microsoft and Twitter have come to an agreement whereby Bing, the revamped MSN search engine, will index Twitter posts. Bing has been creeping steadily up in the search engine league tables over the past couple of months. Google still dominates, but on the sites where I’m working on the analytics, Bing has gone from - on average - less than 0.5% three months ago to around 3% now. If it continues that growth, we’re going to have to look at optimising for it, as well as for Google and Yahoo. Indeed, on some of my sites, though not all, it now provides more traffic than Yahoo.

There’s already plenty of speculation underway as to how to optimise for Bing - and indeed, which sites to optimise, as it appears that Bing performs better in some verticals than in others. According to a Sitepoint article, Bing returns better results in the areas of “health, local, travel and shopping. These are the fields with the highest potential for revenue for both publishers and search engines”. So if you don’t fall into those categories - if your website concerns games, film, sport, academics, or the like - maybe it’s not worth revamping for Bing just yet.

Google aren’t taking this who Bing/Twitter thing lying down, though: they’ve just announced a ‘social search‘ tool. It’s about time someone challenged Google’s dominance of search, though - this competition will definitely result in better search technology.