So finally it happened. This is something I wrote about in April and it seemed inevitable that Google would integrate Twitter and now it’s happening (and the same for Bing).

Well an agreement was reached. We don’t see it within results as of yet, but it’s going to be interesting times for SEO and how they would be filtering through a lot of spam (to gain top results) to show ‘legit’ results. In fact how on earth would Google and Bing determine what is spam and what is not?

What if someone wrote a simple little ping API that pushes a tweet on a competitive topic out each few minutes? Sure, I guess Twitter’s spam scripts are improving, but now all of online marketing industry has lots to talk about.

Even though Twitter’s traffic seems to be in a downturn (in the US) at least this would probably breath a lot of new life into them.

www.bing.com

So, it seems Kumo is actually Bing, but there are some features that I’m not seeing in Bing yet as per my previous reference to the screenshot of an internal beta named Kumo at Microsoft. Not sure at all whether this was the same project, but there are some similarities.

It looks pretty nice, clean, fast and user friendly. I also like the excerpt feature that shows a small snippet of the website content when you hover to the right of search results.

Further if available they show related searches to the left of the results, which I think is pretty cool to quickly zone in on alternate queries that could give better results.

In fact searching for ‘South Africa’ produces alternate suggestions like ‘Map of South Africa’, ‘Johannesburg’, ‘Cape Town South Africa’ (Good to see we feature etc. I like…

Another hidden feature you’ll find under extras (link top right) where there’s a link to Bing Community Beta, which looks pretty boring. Can’t really see anything new and innovative there right away.

Results are pretty fast, but will it trump Google? Not sure. If they open up their advertising system globally, I believe they will have much bigger uptake. Since publishers are making money from Google, they will stay loyal.

Come on Microsoft, give your publishers 30% of advertising revenue and see what happens!!

The question is, what could any new search engine possibly do that would make users move from Google other than pay them to do so?

It has been confirmed that Google is in talks with Twitter about a real time search engine. This would bring about a lot of value to search results, but also some concerns about how it would be managed.

Twitter unfortunately don’t have a current way of deferring spam, except for a subtle reporting of abuse via email or @abuse tweet. What will keep shady marketers from continuously polling twitter on certain topics to increase traffic?

I am however certain of the fact that Google will employ various algorythms to weed out spam, as they’re doing with conventional search results, but it will be interesting to see how they go about it.

I don’t think an outright sale is on the cards, but we could well see a live feed being sourced to Google for producing faster results. As mentioned in the Tech Crunch article, if Google doesn’t receive a live feed the feasibility of such a deal will be worse off, as Twitter depend on real time results and that is what will make it most useful to Google Users.

Things to keep in mind on integration:

• Will there be a limit on frequency of Tweets by unique users indexed or frequency on a specific topic/keyword?
• Will users be able to reply/retweet etc directly from Google Results (if they’re logged into Twitter)?
• Will power users have the ability to track topics (this will be great – maybe with Google Alerts)?
• How will the integration impact Twitters current ability to manage traffic / uptime?
• Give me your thoughts!

Microsoft is reviving the search engine wars with a new engine called Kumo. It’s currently being tested internally at Microsoft. It seems pretty interesting with a tab based filtering menu on the left hand side, to filter your search results according to related categories. How those categories are determined would be interesting to know, but whether it can compete with Google is to be seen.

I think it’s healthy to have competition. It brings about innovation that results in improvements for the user, with all competitors. Will Microsoft one day be able to lay claim to a verb in context like “Just Kumo it” as Google has become? Who knows, but at least Live Search will be replaced, as it doesn’t seem to inspire confidence with the online crowd.

Change is good. I’ll sure try it out when it’s launched in public Beta.

BTW, some useless information: Kumo means ‘cloud’ or ‘spider’ in Japanese  (not sure how that works, but aparently not an often used term).

Check out a screenshot here.

It might not keep the name Kumo as that’s just their current codename for the project, but lets see how it pans out.

More to come…