Earlier this month, a friend and I were walking along a Manhattan street when we happened upon a dozen camera crews setting up to film outside a building made to look like a hospital. "I'll take Google, you take Twitter," she said, as we raced to see which Internet site would be the first to tell us what was going on.

With all the hype and vast advertising campaign on behalf of Microsoft’s new Bing search engine, there is speculation that Bing could be the biggest competition that search engine giant Google has seen to date. Yahoo search is also in the mix, but it is not as big of a competitor in the search market. Other Web 2.0 services could fall into this realm as well, such as Twitter and Facebook, but they both provide user generated content in a more recent state.

In a nod to the increasing importance of real-time search, Microsoft has started adding Twitter updates to its Bing search engine. For now, the Twitter-related results are limited only to searches on prominent Twitterers themselves, not nearly all tweets, according to a blog post by Sean Suchter, general manager of Microsoft’s Silicon Valley Search Technology Center:

Manta newsletter from today re BING and SEO in relation to it. Also a couple of good articles about leveraging video and blogging as a critical part of SEO strategy.

It looks as if Microsoft way have finally hit their Search Engine Stride. Bing, Microsoft's replacement for Live, has shown some steady increases since launching a few scant days ago.

However, much of the traffic may be curious onlookers, coaxed to the Search Engine by the gigantic TV campaign. The only way to know if Bing will remain is to find out if the search results are relevant. And that will take more than a couple weeks.