What’s Steve Ballmer’s favorite Bing feature?

“I’ve fallen in love with our real-time search. I have a high schooler who plays basketball. If you want high school basketball scores, there’s nothing better than Bing Twitter search,” Ballmer told a crowd of search marketing pros at the SMX West conference in Santa Clara on Tuesday.

Hmm. Might be a business opportunity in that?

When a keynote speech for a search marketing conference is expected to be so popular that the organizers, at every opportunity in the preceding 24 hours, urge attendees to Get There Early, you know it’ll be special.

Described as CEO Steve Ballmer’s first conversation with the search engine marketing community at an industry event – the keynote speech at the SMX West conference in Santa Clara this morning came with some of the enthusiasm that once was reserved for operating systems.

Ballmer came to discuss the implementation of the Microsoft and Yahoo search alliance and Bing’s ambition to revolutionize

search and search engine marketing. OK, nobody camped out, but the search pros at the conference, packed the keynote room nearly half an hour before the start time.

Search Engine Land editor-in-chief Danny Sullivan sat down with Steve to discuss the Microsoft/Yahoo relationship and Bing’s plans.

Some of the gems from Steve Ballmer’s discussion with Danny Sullivan on Tuesday:

Besides real-time search, Ballmer said the Bing Maps features that have been demonstrated lately are among his favorite.

Danny pushed Steve on the question of Microsoft ambitions for Bing: “Can you be #1?…”

Steve fielded the questions elegantly: “There is no good answer to this question. If you say Yes, you sound arrogant. If you say No, you sound like you have no faith.

“But a fair degree of realism is required. Even with Yahoo, we have a lot of work to do.”

Danny asked if Yahoo would continue to be a force in the business. Ballmer assured him that it will.

“For us, the goal is to expand the total amount of searches on our platform. Economically, growing overall search share is job 1. We need Yahoo to be successful. The best way is to have 2 healthy companies pushing the Bing results forward. There is advantage to having the power of 2, as opposed to 1.”

The conversation turned to mobile search and advertising.

From the audience came the question: Does PPC monetize on mobile?

Steve pointed out that Microsoft is doing better with mobile monetization that expected. In the future, the division of paid search results and standard results and the layout on mobile devices will be an area for innovation.

“Mobile queries are just going to keep going up and up and up. I’m not predicting we’ll see drop in the number from PCs, but we’ll see rise in total volumes. What that mix may be in 3-5 years from now is hard to predict. There will be a whole class of query for mobile specific.”

Danny Sullivan asked about Steve Ballmer’s search habits and the possibility of his appearance on Twitter, like Bill Gates. Ballmer said he is unlikely to start tweeting, his preference for communication is more long form. Though he does have a stealth account on which he tweets high school basketball scores for the team families from his son’s school.

His search habits are possibly more illustrated by his vision for the future of search.

“A year and a half ago, I wanted to go get some stats on debt as a percentage of GDP. I really knew what I wanted. I could have drawn the Excel spreadsheet. i just wanted the search engine to get the data and put it in the spreadsheet.

“That shouldn’t be that hard. If we understand the intent and the structure of the data, we really can takes steps down that road.

The search engines should be doing that for you. How do you understand user intent. How do you gleen structure out of unstructured data. Those 2 things are going to be important.”