REVEALED: Details of Bing’s Twitter Search

This morning, big news broke that Microsoft had penned deals with Facebook and Twitter that will integrate status updates from the two popular social media services into the Bing search engine.

Now, the details of the deals are being revealed by Microsoft’s search team, led by executive Qi Lu at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Here is the drill down of the announcement:

1. It’s official: Microsoft has penned deals with Facebook and Twitter.

2. Twitter integration is coming first, and goes live in beta today. You can access it at Bing.com/Twitter. Facebook will come later.

3. Microsoft’s new integration with Twitter is essentially integrating Twitter search within Bing. It updates in real-time. Here’s the kicker though: you can search tweets by not only recency, but by relevancy.

4. Microsoft is using information such as the number of retweets, captions, the quality of tweets, and keywords in order to sort tweets by relevancy.

5. Bing will provide top-shared links on Twitter that are relevant to your search query. It will pick two tweets (with the short URLs automatically expanded) to display.

6. Bing will display the “hottest” (trending) topics on Twitter in the form of a tag cloud.

Here are screenshots of what you’ll see, starting today: