Microsoft said on Tuesday that it has begun rolling out new Bing social search features to a small subset of users in the U.S.
Bing"s social search pulls in content from Twitter to display the most relevant tweets within seconds of a breaking news event. Lawrence Kim, Bing social search, explained the new feature in a company blog post. "At Bing, we analyze what topics are generating the most interest on Twitter to bring you the latest and most interesting content," Kim said.
The social search updates are part of Bing"s "spring update" which includes some UI changes and Foursquare map integration. Microsoft has been slowly adding more and more Twitter integration and originally released some real time Twitter result data back in July 2009. Bing also launched bingtweets which provides shared links about the hottest trends on Twitter.
Kim says Microsoft is testing the new search results page to a small subset of users in the U.S. "We plan to make the feature available to our users in the US within a short period," he confirmed.