Neither engine has fully integrated tweets yet, but Bing has a beta version – Bing.com/twitter – that is open to the public.  Upon arrival, a user is greeted by a tag cloud of the hottest twitter topics as well as the top few tweets on those topics.  As Bing’s blogpost explains:

If you want to keep an eye on this topic, you can just watch the Tweets roll in. Or, click on “See more Tweets about…” to go to a page full of Tweets. On that page, you can change the ordering to “Best Match.” Here we arrange Tweets differently. If someone has a lot of followers, his/her Tweet may get ranked higher. If a tweet is exactly the same as other Tweets, it will get ranked lower. For example, I saw a Tweet from ABC News ranked pretty high in the Best Match mode during the “boy in the balloon” fiasco. By the way, you won’t see any of your tweets if you protected or deleted them, and tweets don’t last more than 7 days in our index.

Google does not yet have a product for the public to play with, but it promises to have “a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months.”

Bing Is Ahead

For now, Bing seems to have the advantage over Google.  If it can quickly move out of beta, it has the chance to pick up some share from Google, especially if Google is slow to integrate tweets.  In the meantime, I can’t wait for the next balloon boy so I can test Bing in a real-time scenario.

adCenter Ad Preview Tool – It Exists, But It’s Limited

Hiding inconspicuously on an account’s “Campaign” page, adCenter now features an Ad Preview Tool that enables advertisers to see a results page as it appears to a typical searcher, including all the ads that would appear to that searcher.  Unfortunately, that’s all it does.  Unlike Google’s tool, an advertiser can’t opt to see the ads showing to searchers in specific geographic regions.  Also, if an ad isn’t showing, the tool also doesn’t offer any explanation as to why.  Google’s Ad Preview Tool does, and that feature is a big plus, so we’re disappointed that Microsoft hasn’t emulated it yet.

Search Engine Marketers like Path Interactive have been nagging Microsoft for years about improving its toolset.  It’s nice to see some progress, but it’s essential that they move more quickly to catch up with Google.  Check back for more reports on their progress.

James Connell is Director of Search at Path Interactive

Timeline
This deal will not affect advertisers or searchers for quite some time. The deal first has to gain regulatory approval, which it might fail to do given the denial last year of Yahoo’s proposed deal with Google. If the deal is approved, the issues surrounding such a massive integration likely mean that the deal will not go live before 2010.

Effect On The Market
According to the latest data from Compete, Google dominates the search market with a 73.9% share, compared with 16.6% for Yahoo and 6.5% for Microsoft. That represents an increase of 9.5 percentage points for Google over the past year, and a corresponding fall for Yahoo and Microsoft. It is very possible that this deal will slow or even reverse that trend. Yahoo gets incredible traffic to its various properties, and Bing’s search results have been competitive with Google’s in my testing so far, aside from a few hiccups in its first week. If consumers on Yahoo’s properties learn that searches done from those properties will match or exceed what they would get from Google, then Microsoft/Yahoo could definitely increase share.

What Does This Mean For Advertisers?
Until this deal is approved and put into place, nothing. If it happens, however, it will affect advertisers in a number of ways. First, advertisers will see Microsoft/Yahoo as a more viable alternative to Google, leading more of them to advertise on Microsoft/Yahoo. This extra demand might push up the cost-per-click currently seen on Yahoo & Bing, but probably not by much. Second, Microsoft’s adCenter offers better fine-tuning of PPC campaigns than Yahoo Panama, so search engine marketing experts will be able to create more effective campaigns than those currently appearing on Yahoo.
The most important effect, however, depends on how Bing evolves. As I noted in my last blog, Bing has effectively reduced available impressions by serving limited numbers of ads to searchers who tend not to click on them. This has reduced traffic for some of our clients, and we know that other SEM companies have seen this trend, too. If Microsoft doesn’t change Bing before the deal goes into effect, this impression reduction would change from an annoyance into a major problem. Path Interactive will continue to consult with Microsoft in order to prevent this from happening.