Bing was launched in May this year with an aggressive campaign aimed at stealing some of Google’s market share. In its first week it managed to snatch as much as 11.1% of all US searches.

Now Bing is stepping up its efforts to offer better results and present them is a friendlier manner than Google with the roll-out of a new Twitter feature. From Wednesday Microsoft’s engine will be introducing real-time twitter feeds into search results.

Starting with a few thousand of the most popular Twitterers, determined by follower count and volume of tweets, Bing will display results based on the search of a name in association with “twitter” that include a link to the relevant Twitter page and the latest tweet from that page, should they be available.

For instance, if you search “Al Gore twitter” Bing will return a small image from his Twitter page, a link to his page, the latest post from his page and a link to see more of his tweets.

Sean Suchter, General Manager of Microsoft’s Search Technology Center, commented on the Bing community blog, “We think this is an interesting first step toward using Twitter’s public API to surface Tweets in people search.”

What such a feature promises is a future for human indexed content, not only search optimised content, featuring in search results. This will bring with it an immediacy that no search engine could hope to achieve otherwise.

Image: Bing