Bing brings out the tweets

Microsoft is trying to get a leg up in the real-time search wars by adding Twitter messages to search results.

Bing will now surface results for certain celebrities (leading to the odd pairing of search guru Danny Sullivan and American Idol host Ryan Seacrest in the same sentence) when users search on their names and "twitter," the company announced Wednesday afternoon. It's not indexing all of Twitter, instead picking "a few thousand people to start" and using Twitter's public API to display those results in a special box among the other search results, such as stories that a person might have written about Twitter.

Amid all the nauseating Twitter adoration of late lies a real trend within the search community: the desire to display search results that contain items from real-time communication services. Right now, this is done haphazardly by the Big Three, although smaller companies are trying to offer this service for those who just can't wait.

Both Google and Yahoo, for example, will return the main Twitter page and a single tweet as the top two search results for "Ryan Seacrest Twitter." They don't call out multiple tweets within a single defined box, as Bing will now do with the new feature.

Bing's Twitter feature is rolling out slowly over the day on Wednesday.