Microsoft Strikes Search Deals With Twitter, Facebook

Microsoft has reached collaboration agreements with Twitter and Facebook to get their members' public status updates and messages indexed and presented in useful ways on the Bing search engine. Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft's Online Audience Business, made the announcement on stage at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. The partnership with Twitter has it working with Microsoft to optimize how Bing crawls and indexes "tweets." Microsoft in turn will apply search algorithms to the Twitter messages, so that Bing users will not only be able to see a real-time feed of "tweets" but also rank them by how relevant they are to their query, Mehdi said. "This is a big deal we've been working on for a long time," Mehdi said. To rank "tweets" by relevance, a feature Microsoft calls "Best Match," Bing will take into consideration a number of factors, such as who are the authors of the messages based on a "social relevance" score Bing will assign to them, Mehdi said. Bing will also evaluate the message's quality, noticing, for example, if it contains a link to an online article or Web page. It will also take into consideration how popular the message is by calculating how many times it has been "re-tweeted" by others. In addition to providing links to Twitter messages, Bing will extract the URLs of the pages that the messages are making reference to, so that users can go directly to that source of the information. When providing links to "tweets" that contain a shortened URL, Bing will put in parenthesis the main Web domain of the link, so that users know, before clicking, whether it's a reputable site and thus avoid landing in a malicious phishing or malware-laden site. Bing will also display a tag cloud of the most popular Twitter topics, so that users can click on and dive deeper into them. The Twitter deal is nonexclusive, so Twitter can strike similar agreements with other search engines. However, for now, Bing is ahead of Google with an optimized search experience for Twitter that is already live. Although Google remains by far the most popular search engine, Microsoft is making a big push to improve its position in this market, starting with Bing's launch in May and the broad search deal with Yahoo, which is awaiting regulatory approval. In addition to its core microblogging and social networking features, Twitter has emerged as a repository of real-time testimonies on whatever is on people's minds, such as news stories of global importance, celebrity gossip and hot-button issues. As such, being able to capture, analyze and make sense of Twitter's stream of posts is seen as an important new area in the world of search engines. "We're super happy with the Twitter partnership," said Qi Lu, president of Microsoft's Online Services Division, who was also on stage being interviewed by conference moderator Tim O'Reilly. Lu declined to disclose financial details of the deal. He also said he wasn't sure on its duration. Neither Mehdi nor Lu said much about the Facebook arrangement, other than to indicate that it will be similar in nature to Twitter's but that it will be implemented at a later date. It will be interesting to see what shape the Facebook agreement takes, considering that Facebook allows individual members to make only basic profile information available via search engine results. Facebook has indicated it may let members make their profiles open to anyone on the Web, including their status updates, but that hasn't happened yet. Twitter, on the other hand, is a much more open service and most of its users make public their "tweets," messages that can't be longer than 140 characters. Microsoft and Facebook have an existing partnership through which Microsoft provides Web search and search ads to Facebook.

Accessibility and Availability everywhere

This will be the second part of my post about 1 800 Vending. I talked about this on my previous post about how well the machine is and how much profit you can gain if you wind up trying this kind of business. Vending machines are everywhere. It is very accessible, very easy to find and the nice thing about is you don't have to stand in line just to get you something to drink. It only requires some pennies and your good to go. They have evolved nowadays and the latest is the 1800Vending Twitter Profile1800Vending LinkedIn Profile, where you can create a profile and could linked to somebody. It is more like of a community that talks about 1800 vending as the top of the line vending machines that offer both snacks and soda. That means all the products the consumer wants will be available through one machine. Amazing! With this evolution, they are more open to everyone and more accessible wherever you may be. I personally experience it's availability everywhere. My husband drinks a lot and when we are on our vacation we never encounter such problem when it comes to our sodas because we can get it anywhere with vending machine. There's no hassle and we enjoyed out vacation without being thirsty.