Microsoft Strikes Search Deals With Twitter, Facebook

Microsoft has reached collaboration agreements with Twitter and Facebook to get their members' public status updates and messages indexed and presented in useful ways on the Bing search engine. Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft's Online Audience Business, made the announcement on stage at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. The partnership with Twitter has it working with Microsoft to optimize how Bing crawls and indexes "tweets." Microsoft in turn will apply search algorithms to the Twitter messages, so that Bing users will not only be able to see a real-time feed of "tweets" but also rank them by how relevant they are to their query, Mehdi said. "This is a big deal we've been working on for a long time," Mehdi said. To rank "tweets" by relevance, a feature Microsoft calls "Best Match," Bing will take into consideration a number of factors, such as who are the authors of the messages based on a "social relevance" score Bing will assign to them, Mehdi said. Bing will also evaluate the message's quality, noticing, for example, if it contains a link to an online article or Web page. It will also take into consideration how popular the message is by calculating how many times it has been "re-tweeted" by others. In addition to providing links to Twitter messages, Bing will extract the URLs of the pages that the messages are making reference to, so that users can go directly to that source of the information. When providing links to "tweets" that contain a shortened URL, Bing will put in parenthesis the main Web domain of the link, so that users know, before clicking, whether it's a reputable site and thus avoid landing in a malicious phishing or malware-laden site. Bing will also display a tag cloud of the most popular Twitter topics, so that users can click on and dive deeper into them. The Twitter deal is nonexclusive, so Twitter can strike similar agreements with other search engines. However, for now, Bing is ahead of Google with an optimized search experience for Twitter that is already live. Although Google remains by far the most popular search engine, Microsoft is making a big push to improve its position in this market, starting with Bing's launch in May and the broad search deal with Yahoo, which is awaiting regulatory approval. In addition to its core microblogging and social networking features, Twitter has emerged as a repository of real-time testimonies on whatever is on people's minds, such as news stories of global importance, celebrity gossip and hot-button issues. As such, being able to capture, analyze and make sense of Twitter's stream of posts is seen as an important new area in the world of search engines. "We're super happy with the Twitter partnership," said Qi Lu, president of Microsoft's Online Services Division, who was also on stage being interviewed by conference moderator Tim O'Reilly. Lu declined to disclose financial details of the deal. He also said he wasn't sure on its duration. Neither Mehdi nor Lu said much about the Facebook arrangement, other than to indicate that it will be similar in nature to Twitter's but that it will be implemented at a later date. It will be interesting to see what shape the Facebook agreement takes, considering that Facebook allows individual members to make only basic profile information available via search engine results. Facebook has indicated it may let members make their profiles open to anyone on the Web, including their status updates, but that hasn't happened yet. Twitter, on the other hand, is a much more open service and most of its users make public their "tweets," messages that can't be longer than 140 characters. Microsoft and Facebook have an existing partnership through which Microsoft provides Web search and search ads to Facebook.

Swine Flu Outbreak

Half of those hospitalized with the new H1N1 virus are under 25, a clear illustration that the pandemic is affecting the young disproportionately, U.S. health officials said on Tuesday. They said reports from 27 U.S. states show 53 percent of people sick enough to be hospitalized with H1N1 flu are under the age of 25, with only 7 percent of hospitalizations among people 65 and older. "This is really, really different from what we see with seasonal flu," the CDC's Dr. Anne Schuchat told reporters. "With seasonal flu, about 60 percent of hospitalizations occur in people 65 and over. She stressed the report was incomplete but said if anything, it was underestimating the extent of the pandemic. And an analysis of 292 deaths from 28 states showed that younger people than usual are also dying, she said. "Almost a quarter of deaths are occurring in young people under the age of 25. Specifically, 23.6 percent of the deaths are in that age group. About 65 percent of the deaths are in people 25 to 64 years of age," Schuchat said. Just 12 percent of deaths were among people over 65. In a normal year, 90 percent of those who die from flu are over 65. With cooler weather, other viruses and infections are showing up, making the picture confusing. Schuchat said influenza is being diagnosed in about 30 percent of all people showing up with "influenza-like illness," symptoms that include cough, sore throat, fever and aches. Almost all influenza is turning out to be H1N1 rather than seasonal influenza and Schuchat said the tests often miss cases of H1N1, so the percentage may be higher. Ordinary colds, group A streptococcus, which causes "strep throat", and other infections can cause similar symptoms. The U.S. government is trying to vaccinate people against both seasonal influenza and H1N1 at the same time, making both vaccines available as manufacturers finish, bottle and get them approved batch by batchFive companies make both types for the U.S. market: Sanofi-Aventis SA, CSL Ltd, Novartis AG, GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca unit MedImmune. Schuchat said H1N1 vaccine was becoming available slowly.