bhonda - 10:47 am on Oct 22, 2009 (gmt 0)

Well I can see how this could work. I really doubt Bing and Google, etc, are going to become search engines for Facebook and Twitter - I'm sure they're well aware that they don't want to overpopulate their results with this new data.

Like Hugene said, I reckon this will come into play when there is some large, breaking news that large amounts of people know about before the news sites can get an article written and published. I'm thinking earthquakes, power cuts, extreme weather - I assume the results will highlight whatever event that is being spoken about in Facebook/Twitter, but obviously (read: hopefully!) they won't display every single status and/or link that mentions the given event!

I guess this could be quite dependent on how quickly a status can make it into Google/Bing - if it's close to real-time, this could become a really powerful ally - linking into this whole new user generated content world (or whatever that buzz term is now!). Just imagine - you're in London searching earthquakes in England for some research or something. Little did you know there was an earthquake in sunny Dudley (UK) half an hour before. Twitter and Facebook are full of people talking about it, yet I doubt it would be mentioned on BBC or anywhere else like that. It's possible that it would be mentioned in your search results, even before the media get a hold of it.

Now that could be quite cool.