Microsoft’s latest effort to gain relevance in the search wars is about to get a whole lot more interesting.
According to All Things Digital, the company is set to announce deals with both Twitter and Facebook (
) to integrate status updates into its Bing (
) search engine.
Details are expected to be announced later today at the Web 2.0 Summit, but the stage has been building for this for some time. Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook back in 2007, and has since signed search and advertising deals with the social network.) has been known to be exploring search partnerships for at least the past month, though it’s long been suspected that the company would eventually eye significant revenue in this space. Although Twitter has been said to be willing to offer a full stream of tweets to search providers on a non-exclusive basis, it would appear that Microsoft has beaten Google (
) to the punch in making it happen.
In All Things Digital’s latest report, both of the leading social sites are said to be talking to Google, so Bing’s advantage may be short lived, though it will be “weeks, if not months” until we see any actual integration go live.
More to come …
This is truly huge news. Everyone has been wondering since Twitter was created how it was going to make money. Ladies and gents we now have an idea. I'm just surprised that Google didn't get it first.
