Bing’s Sean Suchter recently announced that Bing will be including some tweets in search results.

Cool. Another example of how smaller, more nimble search entities can outmaneuver their larger competitors. Suchter, the general manager of Microsoft’s Silicon Valley Search Technology Center said that they were following “a few thousand people” and that their criteria for inclusion was their follower count and volume of tweets.

Therein lies the rub. Anyone who spends any time on twitter doing searches for things will know that there are a bunch of blow hards microblogging about their every breath. Sheer volume of tweets is a terrible criteria for search result inclusion. And number of followers? With the number of people who will automatically follow anyone who follows them, all you’d theoretically have to do is get a bot to follow everyone everywhere. It’s one of the most easily spammable parts of Twitter.

Far be it from me to offer this kind of criticism without offering my thoughts on a better solution.

Why not include accounts based on the number of retweets they garner? Retweets show that the original tweet was valuable enough for people to forward. Retweets are as much a vote as a link back to one’s website.

How about only including tweets with links in them? After all, Bing is ostensibly trying to outstrip the other search engine’s ability to access the insta-web capability of Twitter, so including links to pages that aren’t indexed by the big G is probably more worthwhile than following the guy who has a million tweets about walking down the street on a busy day.

How about giving a page that suddenly has a ton of tiny urls pointing to it to the top of the search engines while the popularity lasts?

There is no easy way to leverage the incredible power of instant information that Twitter is beginning to offer, but this move by Bing puts them squarely in the middle of the field for the race to figure out how to do it.

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