The search wars and social wars seems to have conflicted majorly because of Google’s ‘Search Plus Your World’ (SPYW). Google’s promotion of Google+ has not pleased any of its rivals, especially Twitter and Facebook. On the other hand, Microsoft is trying to flesh out this opportunity to the fullest.
Microsoft already uses data from Facebook and Twitter in Bing, but the software giant says that it has only started with Facebook and Twitter connections.
One knows that SPYW does not include Facebook and Twitter as a part of its campaign. Microsoft seems to boost its current deals with the social networks, to challenge Google’s strategy to build a strong social network with Google+.
Interestingly, Bing is the only search engine that has explicit deals to access data from both Facebook and Twitter.
Bing is even Google’s biggest competitor, even though the difference in their calculated percentage is still huge. However, Bing has the social advantage, which has not really been used by Microsoft. That being said, Microsoft is slowly adding more social features that depend on Facebook (and Twitter).
AllThingsD was told by Bing Search director Stefan Weitz that moving social is good for Bing, but one can expect this Facebook/Twitter integration to grow furthermore in the near future. Here is an extract of the post:
Do you think it makes sense for search engines to pay to access social data?
I’m not on the business side, but I think for search to work properly, you have to understand that if a missing component has to be included, you have to [make a deal for] it.
Has social search positively impacted the Bing experience? Are there measurable impacts of social users being more satisfied with their results?
For sure — the biggest thing we see is when you look on the search page and see the faces [of your friends], the click-through rate goes up substantially. It goes back to basic neuroscience: We pay attention to people. The core user experience has gotten a ton better, and it’s very early. We’ve taken a while to do this, but it’s complex.
When are you going to press your social advantage in Bing, seeing as you have both Facebook and Twitter deals and Google doesn’t?
You’re going to see the culmination of a lot of our learnings in the not too distant future. All those lessons will be applied into something that I think is pretty interesting. How we think about social is always evolving, and the next turn of the crank is more differentiated than we’ve seen in the past.
Bing enjoys yet another advantage over Google, that is its efficiency. As Bing has access to the public content of Facebook and Twitter, it can do whatever it wants with the data much more quickly than Google can. However, it is important to note that Google still has access to most of the data that Microsoft has.
Will Microsoft succeed with this social strategy? One will have to wait to know more.