As Google continues to topple Microsoft’s Bing in the area of online search, Microsoft showed us that they’re not backing down, and surprised the social media world with a major announcement on Wednesday: Bing will now feature “tweets” – and soon, Facebook status updates – in real-time as part of their search engine results.

Initial reactions were a bit negative, as users worried about their privacy, and why it was even necessary to include them in results in the first place. After all, there are already many Twitter-specific search engines that produce real-time and analytical results, such as Twitter’s own search feature. Twitter was quick to assure users that privacy settings could be adjusted accordingly, and also stressed the fact that not all tweets would be included in searches. Twitter creator @Biz wrote on the Twitter blog,

“Twitter is providing Bing access to the overwhelming deluge of public, real-time tweets rushing in from all around the world so they can help you find those that make the most sense right now. While Twitter currently presents tweets based simply on timeliness, Bing is experimenting with new solutions such as “best match.”

While the announcement has definitely generated more buzz and usage of Bing, the question still remains: how relevant will it really be? If you’ve ever used the Twitter search, either by keyword or hashtag, the results can be overwhelming, streaming in at hundreds or thousands of results each second. If this happens with the Bing searches, will it turn users away? Microsoft claims there will be a feature to sift out irrelevant results, by analyzing keywords, number of retweets, and more in order to produce the best information; just how well it will work is still to be determined. In the end, users who use Bing as a “decision engine” will definitely have more opinions to chose from in order to make their choice.

This new feature has the potential to be big, as long as it can actually add value. While it may be more convenient, and raw results are interesting to see, but without a purpose, it will slowly become irrelevant. There is more data than ever before, between Web sites, blogs, social media profiles and more. In the race to relevancy, it’s the one who can find a way to bring all of that information together in a useful, interesting, and easily accessible way who will ultimately cross the finish line first. In the eyes of most users, that “one” is still Google.