Microsoft announced yesterday that it had struck deals with Twitter and Facebook to include real-time, social search features on Bing. 

In an announcement at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Microsoft unveiled a live beta of its Twitter search results at Bing.com/twitter. The page features a tag cloud of hot topics on Twitter and a list of shared links on hot topics as a default landing page. From there users can search Twitter via a traditional search box. Search results for Twitter weren’t available, however, when we tried the service.

Microsoft also announced that it had struck a deal with Facebook to allow users to search for status updates posted to Facebook pages in the futures.

Google announced shortly afterwards that it too had struck a similar deal with Twitter and would start to index all public Twitter streams in the coming months.

The idea behind including tweets and updates in search results for Microsoft and Google is quite obviously aggregation. By bring content to search results pages Microsoft and Google are likely to attract/ retain users that have been gravitating towards Twitter and Facebook for real-time information.