While Google may be looking into making Twitter searchable, Microsoft has already started implementing its own real-time search into Bing.

At present it’s a fairly limited offering, indexing “some of the more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres”.

It seems that you can only search for the latest tweets from certain people who have been indexed, using syntax such as “[name] Twitter” or “[name] Tweets” or “@[name]”.

As a concept, it’s a good start though I’m not interested in using any search engine to find anyone’s latest tweets — I use Twitter or one of its desktop clients for that.

What I’d like to see is Twitter results integrated into regular searches.

Perhaps if I search for information on someone who has a Twitter account, it could return their latest tweets in a results pane alongside web pages, images, video etc.

If I search for information on a topic, it could tell me who the prominent people to follow on Twitter are and who most recently tweeted on that topic.

I can do this from Twitter’s own search page, but I think the job of a good search engine is the aggregation and filtering of information from a variety of sources.

I don’t want another way to search Twitter. I want a way to integrate Twitter into the wider web.

I’m sure it’s coming, but who’ll get there first? Even if it’s Bing, current market share dictates that only when Google jumps on board will Twitter search and integration become really big news.

Official Bing blog