Facebook and Bing
The Internet has officially gone social.
Yup, the Internet has given up any hopes for sovereignty and has given in to the temptation of Facebook. OK—not the entire Internet, just Bing.
Bing (owned by Microsoft) and Facebook have created a symbiotic relationship of social searching in that Bing has integrated Facebook into its search results and Facebook has integrated Bing into its internal search. Eat your heart out Google.
While Bing began integrating Facebook content into its search some time ago, the results only lingered at the bottom of the page and went unnoticed by most. Facebook-based content is now featured prominently next to search results, with your friend’s ‘Likes’ appearing next to search results.
The ‘Like’s’ of your friends will not affect the search results that come up—yet, but you will see if any of your friends have ‘Liked’ the page before.
In the future social search will be taken a step further as the two companies have plans to integrate more data from profiles and begin to skew the search results based on your social networks. Eventually we will also see subject ‘experts’ (as identified by social networks) influence search results based on Facebook data streams.
This announcement from Bing came shortly after Google announced its new concept, the Social Search, and it’s integration with social networks. The difference between the two is significant though as only Bing integrates Facebook data, while Google integrates other social networks— but not Facebook. For now social searching on Bing will be more effective than Google for Facebook users.
In addition to Bing being used for Facebook’s search results, and Facebook content being integrated into Bing—there is also a handy toolbar incorporating the two elements. Even though toolbars are ‘oh so 2003’, this one really adds something extra for regular Bing users—it is available here.
