Earlier this month, a friend and I were walking along a Manhattan street when we happened upon a dozen camera crews setting up to film outside a building made to look like a hospital. “I’ll take Google, you takeTwitter,” she said, as we raced to see which Internet site would be the first to tell us what was going on.

Thanks to the large name plastered on the faux hospital, Twitter was the winner with the news that the building was being used to shoot an episode of “Nurse Jackie.”

With its 140-character constraints, Twitter is not going to replace major search engines any time soon, but the real-time search aspect of the micro-blogging site is useful and has caught the attention of Microsoft and Google.

The two companies on Wednesday announced that they have integrated Tweets into their Bing and Google.com search results.

Microsoft has launched a new beta feature within its Bing search engine, while Google said it has reached an agreement with Twitter to include updates in search results.

“Real-time updates like those on Twitter have appeared not only as a way for people to communicate their thoughts and feelings, but also as an interesting source of data about what is happening right now in regard to a particular topic,” Google wrote in a blog post Thursday.

Google’s Twitter integration will be live in the next few months, but Bing’s effort is now available at www.bing.com/twitter.

Specifically, the Bing feature will include a real-time index of Tweets that match your Bing search queries. Microsoft promises to reduce the number of duplicates, spam, and adult content in its results.

The feature will also list the top links being shared on Twitter that relate to your search, but Bing will expand the URLs so users know the site to which they’re clicking. “Instead of showing standard search result captions, we select 2 top tweets to give users a glimpse of the sentiment around the shared link,” Microsoft said.

You can also rank Tweets by how interesting or relevant they are, and Microsoft will evaluate them for quality and whether they are trustworthy or not.

The Twitter feature is currently only available in the U.S.

Microsoft also plans to integrate Facebook status updates into Bing search results, but the company does not have a set date for the release of that feature.

Via: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2354570,00.asp