Today Bing (more info) has added “a bit of twitter” to its searches. As Bing says in its blog

“Starting later today, when you search for these(prominent Twitterers) folks names in association with Twitter, you’ll see their latest Tweets come up in real time on Bing’s search results”.

Though currently it is not indexing all the Tweets and will only include Tweets from a small set of prominent and prolific Twitterers. Bing has picked up these profiles based on follower count and volume of tweets. So, now if you search for say “ashton kutcher Twitter” or “ashton kutcher Tweets” or even “@aplusk” then the result whould be some thing like this.

Though it is not entirely real time with a reported lag of around 10+ minutes, but we can expect this time window to shrink in coming months.

So when can we expect Google(more info) and others to follow suit? I guess this should be an obvious upgrade to all the search engines since real time data is becoming such a critical player in the search arena. And Google needs the real time search juice badly especially after this.

Follow-Up

TechCrunch : Bing Keeps Its Foot On The Gas, Adds Tweets To Results by MG Siegler

search engine land : Bing Adds Twitter Smart Answers by Barry Schwartz

Mashable! :  Bing Includes Tweets With Search Results (For Famous People) by Adom Ostrow

SEARCH ENGINE ROUNDTABLE : Bing Adds Tweets Answers But How Real Time Is It?

eWeek : Microsoft Bing Dings Google, Searches Twitter Tweetsby Clint Bulton

Silicon Alley Insider :  Hats Off To Microsoft For Adding Twitter Search To Bing(MSFT) by Henry Blodget

The Microsoft Blog : Microsoft on Twitter: No kidding! by Nick Eaton

CNET News : Bing brings out tweets by Tom Krazit

MSDN Blogs : Bing Getting Real Time With Twitter