Bing has announced that its search results are now integrated with Twitter, with these being displayed when a specific type of search is made by web users.
Users searching for a person's name along with a Twitter-related term will see their latest tweets as well as a link back to their account within Bing's search results.
However, the new feature only works for a few thousand of the most prolific and prominent Twitter users and does not return tweets based on the content of the each post.
Bing is including Twitter users in the feature based on how many followers they have and how many posts they make.
"We think this is an interesting first step toward using Twitter's public application programming interface to surface Tweets in people search," remarked Sean Suchter, general manager of Microsoft's search technology centre in Silicon Valley.
Despite this, Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim said that he did not think the new feature goes far enough.
"With just a few thousand high profile Twitter users included and no honest-to-goodness real-time search, I feel kind of robbed," he commented.
Twitter unveiled its real-time search feature earlier this year, enabling users to view tweets based on currently trending topics as they are posted.
.jpg)
.gif){kind=small}
