The big news for Twitter this week has been the new deals announced with Bing and Google, as the two search engines start competing to add new functionality and issue press releases. This latest news has been covered widely, such as on the BBC website, and the deals will see messages from the 'micro-blogging' service - or tweets - show up in Bing and Google search results almost as soon as they are posted on Twitter.

Microsoft's Bing search engine has moved first to set up a stand-alone Twitter search page accessible from the main site, whereas Google countered the announcement and said its Twitter search service would debut within the next few months. Although some parts of Twitter already show up in some search results they tend to be for individual accounts or messages that have been archived. Both deals will now take a feed of all public Twitter streams to make them searchable almost as soon as they are sent.

The Bing Twitter search page shows the most popular topics mentioned in the 140 character tweets. Visitors to Bing can also search for specific terms and see relevant messages ranked chronologically, as well as the most popular website links referred to from the relevant posts.