3 Jul 2009, 1922 hrs IST

SEATTLE: Microsoft Corp, seeking an edge over Google Inc and Yahoo! Inc, will include updates from Twitter in its new Bing search engine.

Bing will initially display Twitter feed entries, or Tweets, from prominent users of the social networking site, Microsoft said in a blog posting. Users who search for names like Al Gore along with the word Twitter will get the former vice president’s latest Tweets and a link to see more.

Microsoft released Bing last month in a bid to improve on its third-place ranking in the US Internet search market. The new feature is part of an effort to get more “real-time data” into search results, the company said.

Twitter, used by everyone from Ashton Kutcher to Shaquille O’Neal to Barack Obama, has grown into the third-largest US social-networking site. Companies such as Dell Inc and Starbucks Corp also use the service, sending Tweets to customers.

Tweets from a few thousand people will be included at first, Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft said. They were chosen based on the number of their followers and the volume of messages.

Microsoft fell 67 cents to $23.37 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The shares have climbed 20 percent this year.

Last month, research firm ComScore Inc said Bing increased its share of the Web-search market two weeks in a row. Bing’s share of US queries rose 0.8 of a percentage point to 12.1 percent in the week ended June 12, after jumping more than 2 percentage points the previous week, according to Reston, Virginia-based ComScore.

Google, based in Mountain View, California, leads the market, followed by Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo.

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