Bing Testing Twitter In Search Results

As part of a new test, some Bing users may be seeing Twitter messages mixed in with the regular search results on Bing.com. In a blog post today, Bing explained that the test involves two types of Twitter integration:

First, on searches that Bing identifies as hot/trending, tweets will show up in the search results page under the “Social results about…” heading.

Second, on some navigational queries, Bing will show the most frequently shared links related to the search term. The example Bing provides is a search for the gossip and entertainment site, TMZ, which includes three popularly-shared links and the number of times those links have been tweeted.

Bing says that only a “small subset” of users and queries are getting this test, but it will be rolled out to all U.S. users soon.

Bing was an early adopter of integrating Twitter into search, but it did so very cautiously. Last summer, Bing added Twitter ‘smart answers’ for some prominent Twitter users. In October, Bing announced a separate, Twitter-only search interface at bing.com/twitter. In the meantime, Google went further in December when it added real-time results to its search results page, with most of those coming from Twitter.