MS [and for that matter Google too] have made their respective failed attempts to buy out both Twitter and Facebook. While both Twitter and Facebook decided to thrive on their own then, they didn’t mind the cash inflow this time around by making available the vast real time updates they have at their disposal. Even as Twitter CEO Evans Williams humorously downplayed questions regarding this deal (a day earlier at the Web 2.0 summit), Microsoft’s online services group President Qi Lu went on to explain the deal, a deal that MS likes to call “Bing Wave 2″.  Lu said the deal with their other prospective partner, Facebook, will come in at a later point. Excerpts from his interview here and a conversation with ‘O Reilly here.

The official Bing-Twitter Integration is up and live at http://www.bing.com/twitter, for the US only (so change your country preference to US  to check it out). It has a tag cloud showing the hottest topics on twitter (similar to Twitter’s trending topics) and also sample tweets on each of them.When we actually make a particular query, we get the tweets in two categories ‘Most recent’ and ‘Best match’. The Tweets corresponding to the search tag are supposedly updated in real time (but when we checked it out, didn’t quite find it to be so!!). This is just a basic setup live and should get more compact/trendy and feature laden with time. A snapshot :

The deal in itself is huge (and we are not talking in just financial terms here, infact Qi Lu passed the question when asked about the Financial terms of the deal), taking ‘Search’ on to the real time corridors.The deal gives MS, the access to full (public) Twitter data feed. This, for sure, is a formidable blow to its arch-rival Google. Twitter too has been looking at options recently for some revenue generation. This deal (and the upcoming one with Google) should suffice for some time now. The other options (read ads) is a scary one in itself.!! If the deal with Twitter is big, that with Facebook is going to be bigger, what with the 45 million status updates per day from 30 million unique visitors.

While all this does sound great, the question to be asked is : “Isnt this at some point the invasion of  user privacy?“. The question holds less of a significance with respect to Twitter (considering that its user’s tweets are more in the public domain), but gets pretty significant in the context of Facebook (whose users want to share those updates only amongst their friends). News has it that Facebook is going to provide its users with options in this regard. Wonder how this entire deal looks  in the light of Twitter’s user friendly TOS (Terms of Service) that says – users very much own their Tweets. So what if MS starts Archiving these tweet streams. Facebook have anyways a non-friendly TOS (as per which, Facebook can use/modify/publish  your status updates and that too even after you terminate your account!!). Probably the Bing-Facebook integration will further fuel the issue. So are the users ready to let these giants invade their privacy (read status updates) for the sake of a perfect real time search? Readers’ opinion solicited.

This has been happening right since the day Bing declared Visual Search, live, during its presentation. I tried it a couple of times before  I finally tweeted to the Bing team about the same. No surprises from Microsoft again.!! It took them over a week to respond, mentioning the problem.  All that I needed to do was  change my country preference in Bing to US. To cut the long story short, Bing Visual Search has been released in the US only. You can change your country preference by clicking on the country name on the Bing Homepage.

It was only so far that I had to go to get the Bing Visual Search to work. However, for me it was one step further. I was on Linux and Bing Visual Search needs Silverlight installed as a pre-requisite. I found a developmental release for the same but couldn’t  get it to work quickly enough. So, I switched to my brother’s machine, to write about Bing. This happened to be a Windows Machine with Silverlight installed.

After successfully crossing all hurdles, I was ready to dissect  Microsoft’s answer to Google. 

Time to check out Bing Visual Search then. So I thought of  visually searching Laptop only to realize that I couldn’t. Right now only, a limited no of featured galleries are provided by Visual Search Galleries Beta. Not allowing this setback to bog me down, I went on to  search for Digital Cameras . Voila! The Bing team gets its first round of applause from the people who were around me for providing a Visual Treat in their Visual Search.

The results were  pretty impressive with a number of links like, “most popular on Bing”, “highest megapixel”  on the left hand side of the page. Filters like “megapixel”, “optical zoom”, brand etc are extremely useful additions to a search engine, atleast usability wise. At the end of it all you do get your  prized camera, with its pricing, reviews and related information, all under one roof.

So Whats the verdict?

First the pros :

• A Visual  treat to say the least. You will get to hear at-least a couple of wows if you check it out in a group of three.
• The concept is brilliant. Microsoft is not attacking Google in its forte, it seems. They are trying to provide a better overall searching experience. And should this be added here – Bing is the fastest growing search engine.
  
• Getting so much information about the camera of your choice stacked together is a nice experience.

Now the cons :

• Available only for the US. You need to change your country of preference to US.
• Limited number of galleries. Bing needs to add up a lot more galleries very soon, else someone like me will consider it a one time visual experience.
• Comparison between two products, which come up in the same search result, didn’t seem possible. A suggestion from my side to the Bing team.
• SilverLight for Linux ( A demand from my side).
• Sometimes Bing Visual Search seems like  the product comparison sites with a few extra features added  and a couple of existing features removed.

Overall, for me Bing Visual Search is a breath of fresh air in a Google dominated search industry. Good competition may mean better search experience for people like us.

Finally, the microreviews team wishes the Bing Team the very best in its future endeavours.  Hope you guys take Visual search to the next level, where, for atleast a certain number of search based tasks Bing is the first name.