Microsoft is currently looking to make a bigger splash in the search market. Through the first nine months of 2008 the company committed more than $1.5 billion to acquiring search, or search-driven businesses including a $1.3 billion buyout of enterprise specialists Fast Search & Transfer. Redmond hopes to catch up to Google in search market share. But it\’s got its work cut out. Google presently controls about 65% of the U.S. search market, while Microsoft owns only about 8% of the market, according to ComScore. Yahoo, the number two player, held 20% of the market, as of May.
It\’s positioning Bing not just as a search site, but as a so-called decision engine. Bing includes features that allow users to book travel and engage in other e-commerce transactions with just a few clicks. However Microsoft unveiled an initial foray into integrating more real time data into our search results. Microsoft has added a feature to Bing that allows the search engine to query the Internet for so-called real time data, including postings from Twitter users. Starting with some of the more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres. There has been much discussion of real-time search and the premium on immediacy of data that has been created primarily by Twitter. Among the Twitterers that Bing will index at the outset are Wall Street Journal tech columnist Kara Swisher and a number of Microsoft staffers. Bing will index a few thousand Twitter users in the project\’s early days. The index includes Tweets from Al Gore, American Idol\’s Ryan Seacrest, and a number of other high-profile figures from the arts, politics, and technology
