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Searching the past and the present

Google's great as a search engine when it comes to the past but what about the present? I'm not simply talking about what you might find on Google News as they trawl through traditional media (eg newspaper) sites and link to articles that have appeared on those sites (quite recently) but more about what people are thinking and experiencing right now. When I want this sort of information I go to Twitter. This post from the Search Engine Watch blog covering the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco describes what Microsoft is up to in this area with Bing. Looks like they have signed deals with Twitter and Facebook. On the Twitter side of things, it seems that there will be a Bing Twitter search using information such as number of followers and retweets to help filtering. You might be able to check out the beta at http://www.bing.com/twitter/search. I tried and it didn't work - got a message saying 'Twitter search results not currently available' but at least you can look at some sort of Twitter tag cloud. On the Bing blog I think I found out the reason why - its only available in the USA at the moment. If so, the error message could have been a bit more helpful. When I first saw the SearchEngineWatch post I sort of jumped to the conclusion that the Twitter search results would be available in their general search but the Bing blog suggests that it is a separate interface just searching Twitter. If so, then I don't see what the big deal is as there are plenty of other ways to search Twitter.

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