Twitter Bling on Bing for Famous People

You have to give Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, a lot of credit. Since the launch last month, it has done a terrific job of winning over a growing number of people with some savvy public relation efforts.

The latest is the launch of results that show Twitter updates….as long as you’re famous. Dipping its toe into the real-time search market, Bing now presents Twitter updates from “prominent and prolific Twitterers”.

“We’re not indexing all of Twitter at this time… just a small set of prominent and prolific Twitterers to start. We picked a few thousand people to start, based primarily on their follower count and volume of tweets. We think this is an interesting first step toward using Twitter’s public API to surface Tweets in people search. We’d love to hear your feedback as we think through future possibilities in real time search.”

Not surprisingly, the inclusion of Twitter results has received enthusiastically received by many high-profile bloggers – many of whom fall into the “prominent and prolific” category.

It’s another example of how Microsoft is making some smart moves to give Bing a fighting chance. While Bing has some interesting wrinkles, Microsoft has realized that going head-to-head with Google is not a game it’s going to win, so it’s taking another tactic based on coming across as fuser-friendly and a willing to be creative.

So far, it looks like a smart strategy based on Bing’s market share gains recently.