Google Social Search vs. Bing Twitter Search

Twitter has made the social media revolution even more significant than by its forerunners; MySpace and Facebook.  Celebrities, corporations, the computer savvy, and even the not-so-computer-savvy have taken interest in this word-of-mouth micro-blogging site; indeed, very powerful source for information. Both Google and Bing have taken notice of Twitters influence in the search market. They now display Twitter search results and information for other social media sites; but which search engine is doing it better?

When the search bar on Twitter began getting significant search traffic for those wanting to find out what people are talking about, Twitter created its own official Twitter search site. It is meant for someone to be able to search what people are saying right now; and in real-time. I am not sure if Twitter has an algorithm that posts only the most relevant tweets or if it just continues refreshing the feed to include all tweets in real-time. These search results have been significant enough in generating traffic to be an integral part of Social Media Optimization (SMO) techniques used by Internet Marketing Professionals.

Until recently, Twitter search had an advantage over Bing and Google whereas Twitter Search was a real time search engine. Google and Bing “crawl” and then index pages in order for them to show up in search engine results.  Google has been getting closer to real-time search capability with Google Caffeine (their latest version search engine still in beta), which promises to index pages faster.  Now Google Labs has created Social Search. The results will include Twitter, Flicker, and Friend-Feed and other major social sites. The search results look similar to any Google search result page; but the system has been down in recent days so it certainly isn’t without its bugs and warts, at least at present.

Bing actually started producing social searches first, in particular with Twitter, by providing results for recent tweets on the hottest topics being discussed on Twitter. Their results also include Facebook.  Bing has created a designated page title at www.bing.com/twitter.  When logging on to the page, it gives you a word cloud with the hottest searches. I think this is a cool feature. Second up is the shared links section about the hot topics. Once you click on a word in the word cloud, you will have search engine results showing recent tweets from the user; their profile pic and an option to RT (retweet) right from the results page.

So far, Bing seems to be the winner in social search. Although Bing focuses on Twitter, the way they display their results and features is much more interesting. For search engine marketing, Bing is a useful sight to easily see hot topics and offers potential for link baiting within social media. Social Search is only growing in popularity and could become just as popular for searching products, services, and information. Bing is a major search engine, but Google still commands the dominant market share. Stay tuned as Google and Bing continue developing Social Search as part of their search results.

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