China’s Baidu introduces Weibo posts into search results

China’s most popular search engine Baidu has taken what could be a big leap forward in making search more social.

In an official blog post, the company announced that it would be including posts from the country’s wildly popular microblogging service Sina Weibo in its search posts.

According to the company, “Baidu will now return up-to-date Sina Weibo content that matches keyword searches for breaking news or popular trending topics”.

Baidu claims that it will also show results from “the other three major Chinese internet major portals’ microblog services”.

The Chinese giant says it will clearly display search results from the microblogs as such.

“Users can click on ‘Newest Microblog Results’… on their results page to see additional relevant microblog content from the four major portals’ respective microblog services” it adds.

Baidu reckons the inclusion of microblog posts in its offering will only make it a better search engine:

A search engine’s core competitiveness is determined by its ability to deliver the most comprehensive, accurate and timely information to users. Real-time microblog search takes its place alongside other world-class search services Baidu already offers, like news, flight information, weather, traffic conditions and sporting events.

Baidu’s decision to include search results from a variety of social services is directly opposite to that of its most prominent Western counterpart Google.

The California-based search stopped displaying real-time updates from the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Quora results after it killed its own real-time search offering in 2011. The move was believed to be part of its attempts to leverage its own social offering Google+.