Microsoft’s search engine Bing initially commenced using Facebook data in its searches in October 2010, and later introduced a social sidebar in May 2012. When it introduced the sidebar, the Microsoft-owned search engine assured users they would soon be able to tap into many of their social networks to help them find what they are looking for.
With that assurance, Bing has been moving full steam ahead, and on Wednesday, Bing and Quora have forged a partnership that will incorporate Quora content in Bing’s social sidebar.
It is quite a remarkable effort by Quora to brand itself as the de facto Q&A platform on which people post queries in the hopes of hearing the answer from among savvy Web users in the social network. Relevant Quora friends appear in the “People Who Know” section, and Bing searchers can see all the answers they have submitted based on that keyword.
Henceforth, anytime you search in Bing (assuming that is something you do), relevant answers from your Quora friends will pop up along side the standard results.
According to report on the Mashable website, here is how it works: If I run a search on “restaurants in San Francisco,” for example, Bing will scan Facebook’s open graph and recommend that I get in touch with a friend who lives in San Francisco. I can even send my query to that friend by composing a Facebook status update on the sidebar and tagging that friend. And now that Bing has integrated Quora, the search engine will also surface Quora posts, like this one, that address the same question.
Even though Bing’s social search is in the budding stages of development, it is already quite useful. Quora integration is smart because its own user-voted ratings system helps bubble up quality content.
In fact, what Bing has in mind here is, searchers may find that an expert answer by a Quora user that provides a superior answer to Bing’s own search results. When a Bing user hovers over the Quora social sidebar result, answers to questions about the search topic by Quora “experts” will be listed.
On the other hand, Bing social search contain results from Facebook and Quora and is also working with Foursquare, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Nevertheless, though the latest enhancement makes the site more worthwhile, it is not likely to win-over any significant number of Google search users to switch over to Bing. The former still owns 64.4% of the search market as of April, according to Experian Hitwise. Bing owns 30%, about half of which are searches conducted on Bing.com; the other half of its share comes from Bing-powered searches on third-party websites like Yahoo.
Finally, U.S. users will begin to see Quora results in the sidebar beginning Wednesday. The company did not say when the rollout will be complete, nor when it will extend outside of the U.S.