Redmond, Washington — In a surprising move of corporate cooperation, Microsoft’s Bing “decision engine” on Monday announced that it has teamed up with Facebook to deeply integrate the social media network “likes” and recommendations from friends and strangers into search results, basically transforming the way it will create results.
Moving forward, people who use Bing search will receive personalized results based on what their trusted group of Facebook friends like. Did your sister and roommate “like” a nearby Italian restaurant? A small photo, the Facebook “thumbs up” icon, and a note that said they approve will show up in search results, Microsoft said.
According to Microsoft: “The best decisions are not just represented by facts, they require the opinions and emotions of your friends. Search is now more than a fact finder — [In this update] we are unifying fact-based search results with your friends’ street smarts to combine the best data on the Web with the opinions of the people you trust the most and the collective IQ of the Web.”
Microsoft initially began incorporating the “like” button into its search back in February as an expansion of a partnership that was announced in October. Today’s announcement also incorporates the opinion of people not in your direct social circle. For instance, say you search for “Star Magazine.” The results will also display links to some “Star” stories that readers have liked, even if they are not your friends.
“Search is better when it is not just based in math and algorithms, but also inculcated with the opinions of people,” Microsoft said in a blog post. “Input from the collective IQ can enable search to become a discovery tool, allowing you to benefit from the connections, inferences and ‘likes’ of it.”
Not only will the new Bing with Facebook will simply prioritize results based on what your friends have liked, but the search engine will use the information it gleans from Facebook to actually modify your search results.
Here is a detailed description of what the Facebook integration will look like on Bing:
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Enhanced “Liked” Results, Answers and Sites: Instantly view which stories, content and sites your Facebook friends have “liked,” from news stories, celebrities, movies, bands, brands and more. Bing shows the faces of up to three of your friends that like a search result, offering a visual, virtual seal of approval from your trusted social network.
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Personalized Results: Bing presents a more personalized search results by using the interests shown by your friends. Now you would not miss potentially interesting information that may have been buried deep within the search results. Because most people do not go beyond page one of the results, they might be missing out the best and most “socially relevant” information.
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Popular Sites: Bing displays well-liked content, including trending topics, articles and Facebook fan pages, from sites across the web, to help you dig in and quickly find exactly what you are looking for. When you search for a recipe site, for instance, you will see specific articles people have liked on that site to help you cut through the clutter and find recommendations from others — both your friends and the broader Facebook community.
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Integration of Social Messages: Bing not only displays what your friends like and share online, but also what major brands and companies are saying. For instance, when you search for Avis, the answer on Bing will incorporate any recent Facebook posts alerting you to a new deal.
Of course, friends may not always present the expertise that you need about a subject, so Bing also taps into the collective “Likes” of general members on the Facebook community to help clue you in on top trends and articles.
“All this data collected from ‘Likes’ is potentially very valuable,” says analyst Greg Sterling, a principle at Sterling Market Intelligence, who suggests that there may be incentives offered by companies–a $2 coupon off latte–for Facebook members who click on Like.
Moreover, Bing is also incorporating Facebook profile search into the engine, so that when you search for a person, Bing will provide a detailed “bio snapshot” of the person based one their Facebook profile. Also, Bing users can connect to Facebook via a menu on the top-right corner of the website, and turn the integration on and off from there. They can not, however, pick and choose what personal information Bing and Facebook will share when the integration is turned on.
In fact, this is altogether a novel chapter for Bing. By tapping into Facebook’s social media graph, the number two global search engine is betting that users will want to navigate the web with a little help from their friends.
Here is a feature summary video from Microsoft:
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