Microsoft to Add Facebook, Twitter Data to Bing Search Results

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on October 21, 2009 - 8:54am.

San Francisco - Microsoft (NASD: MSFT) announced on Wednesday that it has signed separate deals with Facebook and Twitter, to bring real-time status updates from the services to its Bing search engine. While financial terms of the nonexclusive agreements were not disclosed, PaidContent cited earlier reports pegging Twitter's take as "several million dollars," in addition to a share of ad revenue.

A beta version of real-time Twitter search results on Bing has already gone live at Bing.com/twitter.

Facebook integration was said to be coming at a later date; unlike Twitter, Facebook users can choose not to publicly share their status updates.

Microsoft already provides search services to Facebook, and purchased a stake in the company two years ago for $240 million.

All Things D reported several weeks ago that Twitter was in talks on a real-time search agreement with both Microsoft and Google (NASD: GOOG).

Currently, Google does not provide real-time status update searches for Twitter or Facebook.

Related Links:
http://snipurl.com/smy9z (Bing blog)

http://snipurl.com/smy2k (All Things D)

http://snipurl.com/smy6k (PaidContent)

http://www.bing.com/twitter