Redmond, Washington — In an attempt to rival Google’s recent upgrades to its search engine which allows real-time search results for Twitter posts, Microsoft’s Bing is taking a leap forward on last year’s promise on Wednesday announced that Facebook search will go live later today at bing.com/social, complete with full status updates and Fan pages in search engine results, as well as Twitter results will also be included into one search experience.
The latest alliance delivers the power of social chitchat to search, which has traditionally been a bunch of blue links and static Web pages. At the Search Marketing Expo’s SMX Advanced conference in Seattle, Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi, Senior Vice President of the Online Audience Business at Microsoft, announced that Bing will start to integrate with Facebook data fan pages and publicly shared links.
Precisely imitating Google, which early this week integrated real-time Twitter and Facebook feeds in to its search engine query results, Microsoft’s search engine will also combine both Facebook and Twitter results and publicly shared status update links will index in search query results starting today.Bing’s Lawrence Kim writes in a Bing Community post that the new attributes will become live later today and be accessible at bing.com/social. Bing assures that the Facebook links that appears in search results are based on Facebook updates that are shared with “everyone.” The company is even going so far as to share only the link content, so Facebook users’ names and photos would not be revealed. According to Kim, “none of the non-Fan Page content can be traced back to the individual user. Microsoft’s intention is that the move will enable Bing to deliver fresher trending topic results. The real-time trending topics will also show up on slightly redesigned Bing search pages.
According to Kim’s post on the blog, the search engine will do this as follows, “Searching for ‘World Cup’ will display what links Facebook users are sharing on the topic — with a caption that is extracted from the original article shown below the link.”
“Also, when you search for a movie in the main search results, you might see that five people shared a link on a movie opening this weekend,” says Adam Sohn, senior director in the online services division at Microsoft Bing. “We are still experimenting on how the results will show up in the SERPs.”
Further, Bing will update the homepage of the site to provide trending topics based on data collected from both Facebook and Twitter.
Also declared at the conference were new Bing Webmaster Tools, organized to “offer a simplified, more intuitive experience that delivers an extensive view of how Bing indexes their sites.” A new Silverlight-enhanced interface will offer charts that graphically show webmasters six-months worth of index and traffic data. More info on these upcoming changes to the tools can be found on the Bing Webmaster blog. The free tools will become available “soon,” according to Microsoft—no more specific release date was announced.
The move comes a couple of days after its search partner, Yahoo, announced that it would begin accumulating Facebook status updates and build tools that would allow people to easily share pieces of ads with others connected within their social graph; Thus this integration represent Bing’s social networking play initiated with a Twitter tie-in a year ago. The news comes on the heels of Google launched its new search infrastructure, Caffeine and in the midst of widespread Twitter outages.
One could see how this real-time combination of what is important to users of Twitter and Facebook could be used effectively to market and advertise one’s products and services. For advertisers, the advantage of garnering search queries from Facebook Fan pages gives brands another way to communicate with existing and prospective customers. Serving a brand’s page in search queries gives them wider distribution for their message because consumers not only get the Coca-Cola Web site on searches, but updates from the Facebook Fan page, too. A valuable asset indeed.