Bing.com Beta Release: Twitter Search Engine - SEO

Twitter has proven itself to be not only an incredible social networking site but also a growing site for up-to-the-minute news, celebrity interaction and more. As Twitter continues to take over the world, it only makes sense that companies would adapt to work with Twitter. Microsoft landed a deal with Twitter which gave them the opportunity to mesh their Bing.com with Twitter. Bing now has created a specialized search engine that allows Twitter users to search twitter in a variety of ways including by trending topics, keywords, by user name and more.

The premise for the Bing.com Twitter program is to allow users to search Twitter for exactly what they want and get RELEVANT results (like Google would provide to a user preforming a search.) If you are a Twitter user, you have likely searched for something and ended up with a lot of “keyword spam” or irrelevant results.
So the question is; “How does Bing Determine what is *relevant*?”

And the answer is that relevancy is based on follower count. Will this system really work? Maybe... most spammers aren't going to spend the time to build up a legitimate Twitter profile with enough real followers to have their tweets appear in search results. However, I have seen some pretty spammy profiles with 8,000 followers – however, the “spammer” has to follow 20,000 people in order to get the 8,000 follow backs. With this flaw in the system, it will be possible (and maybe easy) for a spammer to outweigh a REAL person who has 2,000 followers and only follows 200 people. So wouldn't it make more sense to use a follower vs follow back ratio to determine tweet rank? Obviously if someone has MORE followers than they are following they would be a legit person.

After checking out the Bing.com Twitter “program” I have to say that I am completely not impressed and find it to be next to useless. Granted, the Bing Twitter program is still in Beta, so maybe I will cut them a little slack – but I still remain unimpressed. There are some features as far as the algorithm is concerned that I do like –

1. Duplicate posts will be stripped from the search engine. So if anyone is using those “auto post programs” that automatically repost the same tweet over and over, those posts will be excluded from results.

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2. “Real Time” VS “Best Match”. Currently, Twitter only gives results in chronological order, meaning the newest tweet that matches the search will be #1 in search results. Bing plans to provide the option of “Best Match” that will allow users to get tweet results from anytime; not just newest posted.

I guess we will have to wait and see how the program looks after Beta has been completed. Either way, its exciting to find new ways to integrate SEO and Twitter.

Do you use Twitter? Cool people to follow:
Tori Thompson (me!)
DJ PlaZma
Funtasticus
JimmyVo
DetroitCCW
VegasMMAWarrior
ckfighter
LingerLonger247
bkbdby
Father Wizard
DJ Curtis
Sarah In Michigan