I read with interest today a post on the Bing blog Get the Latest on Twitter with Bing Social Search which describes how tweets are soon going to show up in Bing search results. On the surface that isn’t very interesting, Google has been doing this for a while, but of particular interest to myself was the following screenshot:

We can see at the bottom of a search result for “TMZ” that Bing is showing us the most popular TMZ stories as determined by the number of tweets that contain links to them.

This is great. Bing are applying a principle that those of us in the Business Intelligence (BI) trade have known for ages: a piece of data in isolation is not very interesting but when you aggregate a lot of that data you find the trends that actually matter and when you surface that data in a meaningful way then people can derive real value from it. That sounds obvious but this new Bing feature is the first time I have seen the principle applied in a useful way to tweets and I applaud them for that; its certainly a lot more useful than the pointless constant tweet scroll that you see on Google. What a shame its going to be, yet again from Bing, a US-only feature.

@Jamiet