BingTweets?? Get all the details HERE!

Recently, the Bing Search team announced a new service that’s a mashup of the Bing search engine and Twitter: BingTweets. Through a partnership with Federated Media and Twitter, the site integrates real-time search results from the micro-blogging service with the traditional results from the Bing “decision” engine.

When you go to BingTweets, you’ll see two separate sections on the site – a larger window on the right for Bing searches and a thinner sidebar on the left where Twitter search results appear. To begin a search, you simply type your query in the Bing search box just as you would when performing a typical search. Once your results appear, you’ll notice that the Tweets column is updated too with Twitter search results containing your keyword or search terms.

Even better, the Twitter search results update in real-time! The tweets in the sidebar are constantly in motion as new results are posted to the service, so you don’t have to refresh the page or column to see the latest. That’s already a notch above Twitter’s own engine at search.twitter.com where you’re forced to click the “refresh” link when new tweets are available.

BingTweets manages to top Twitter’s “trending topics” section, too. Twitter’s trends section features a handful of the top words, phrases, and hashtags being posted on Twitter – often getting diluted with spammy marketing hashtags and other silly tags a group of folks thought it would be fun to promote. BingTweets does trends a little differently…and arguably better, if you ask me.

They’ve divided the trends into different categories like People, Places, and Products as well as a “Popular Now” category, which is more like Twitter’s own trends. Also, the topics within each section are presented in a tag cloud style so hotter topics with more tweets are larger and fading topics with less tweets are smaller. This is useful for knowing exactly which topics are trending up and down.

It’s interesting to compare BingTweets with Twitter trends, too, since they don’t feature quite the same info. For example, the hashtag #iranelection is still showing as a trending topic on Twitter but it wasn’t on BingTweets. Alternately, BingTweets featured two variations of “All Star Game” (last night’s big Major League Baseball event) but Twitter does not.

Finally, a box at the top of the BingTweets page lets you share your search results either through tweeting a link to that BingTweets page or on other social media services via a “Share This” button.

As with everything Bing, the best experience is currently US based (just set your Bing location prefences to United States) however a Europe wide rollout is planned to arrive "shortly" 

 Watch this space for updates..