Bing jumps on Twitter-mania with tweet index

Microsoft is trying to get a leg up in the real-time search wars by adding Twitter messages to search results.

The software company's recently launched Bing will now surface results for certain celebrities when users search their names and "twitter", the company announced Wednesday afternoon.

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It's not indexing all of Twitter, instead picking "a few thousand people to start" and using Twitter's public API to display those results in a special box among the other search results, such as stories that a person might have written about Twitter. Amid the Twitter-mania of late lies a real trend within the search community: the desire to display search results that contain items from real-time communication services.

Both Google and Yahoo!, for example, will return the main Twitter page and a single tweet as the top two search results for a celebrity name and "twitter". They don't call out multiple tweets within a single defined box, as Bing will now do with the new feature.

Original article: Bing brings out the tweets from CNET News.com