Bing's real-time twitter search launched after Microsoft agreed a deal with twitter

Twitter has announced deals with both Microsoft Bing and Google allowing them to include real-time tweets in their search results.

Co-founder Biz Stone announced the link up on the company's blog revealing Bing's new Twitter search facility.

He said: "While Twitter currently presents tweets based simply on timeliness, Bing is experimenting with new solutions such as 'best match.' We hope more working relationships with organizations in the search business will mean even more variety for users."

Microsoft confirmed the deal saying: "Twitter give us access to public opinion and thoughts in a way that has not before been possible. From important social and political issues to keeping friends up to date on the minute-by-minute of our daily lives, the web is getting more and more real time."

The variety for users did not take long to materialise, when soon after twitter revealed its deal with Google. The site's other co-founder Evan Williams blogged: "We've partnered with Google to index the entire world of public tweets as fast as possible and present them to their users in an organized and relevant fashion."

The announcement comes a day after Evan Williams awkwardly avoided questions about possible deals with Microsoft and Google at the Web 2.0 Summit 2009. Williams had admitted that twitter's current search facility was "pretty primitive as searches go."

The deals are positive for journalists as developments from the search engines will hopefully make it easier to filter tweets and find information.

Twitter proudly invited users to 'just try out' Bing's twitter search right away at http://www.bing.com/twitter, however when I tried this evening I was told "Twitter search results are currently available." Maybe its more of an evolution than a revolution after all.

Twitter CEO Evan Williams being questioned by John Battelle about the site's future plans at Web 2.0 Summit 2009 (Photo: James Duncan Davidson)

Twitter’s CEO says that they are putting significant resources into improving how journalists can search tweets.

Speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Twitter co-founder and CEO Evan Williams said they were pleased that journalists were using the site to get information.

In a conference Q&A he said: “I’m glad that you [journalists] are seeing that use. We’re putting a ton of effort into search and discovery on twitter. It's pretty clear that we’ve just scratched the surface at what's possible.

"We have all this real time data, and as I like to think about it we have all this millions of information collecting nodes all over the world reporting on what is happening and we have the ability to mine that and display that in real time. But we need to get much more intelligent about that, it's primitive in terms of how search goes.”

However he said that it was likely that most tools for journalists for the site would be developed by third parties rather than Twitter. Williams said: “The specific tools for media and journalists is a great area for third party developers to focus on because we need to focus on what the mass users need.”

Williams also talked about the site's new Lists feature that promises to help new users find people to follow and filter overflowing streams of tweets. The feature will be available to all users around the end of October.

Earlier this month Williams said he thought journalists had role in helping audiences sifting the signal from the noise on the site.

The full video of the Q&A with John Battelle can be found below.

However as good as they can be, there are somethings for which searches do not work. Yesterday The Times' Joanna Geary tweeted, "Oh good grief! Any tips on how to search and filter for news stories about automotive brand Seat?#namesthatdon'tworkontheweb."

I think she was talking about searching on the web generally, but it raises the issue of how not everything is easy to find on twitter. Words like Seat are confusable and it's therefore hard to find the tweets which relate to the meaning you want, eg. the brand Seat, rather than just seats.

It is not just confusable words which are hard to find. When people tweet, with only a few exceptions, people do not generally use the 140 characters to include every keyword and tag their tweet relates to. For example, if I'm tweeting about something that happens outside my flat, I usually say 'outside my flat' rather than including the GPS co-ordinates, postcode, ward, borough, county, region, country and continent of my house. So if you were searching for things happening in my area, it's likely it might not come up in any searches.

To some extent I think it provides some relief that twitter does have imperfections which stop it being completely Orwellian. Nevertheless which websites do you find helpful in searching tweets for stories? I'm trying out TwitterLocal, which allows you to find tweets coming from a specific area, I will let you know how I get on.