You got your Facebook in my Bing! Well, you got your twitter in my Google!
Sheesh, what the heck is going on with social media and search engines these days? First Google announces something called “Social Search” that would allow Twitter and other social networks to influence a user’s results, and then Microsoft announces a partnership with Facebook to integrate Facebook user’s data into Bing search results. The services are both in their fledgling stages, but it seems clear that the battle lines have been drawn: the next big fight in search engine land is who can best harness the social web. So, today we’re going to talk about Bing and Facebook, but check back soon for how Google is responding to all of this with social integration of their own.
Bing “Likes” Facebook
While Facebook data has been incorporated into Bing in a number of subtle ways for a little while now, it is not until just a few weeks ago that Bing progressed into the second phase of those efforts by including Facebook’s “Like” functionality directly on its search results pages. When you do a generic search for a restaurant, for instance, and there happens to be a restaurant that three of your friends have “liked”, Bing may favor that result over others while also showing a user pictures of up to three of their friends that have “liked” that restaurant. This is part of Bing’s “Trusted Friends” initiative, and for now it is only using Facebook data.
The next part of Bing’s efforts is called “collective IQ”, and it pertains to influencing Bing results based off of the aggregate activity by Facebook users on the web. In other words, if a number of Facebook users have “liked” a link in the last day or so, and another Bing user performs a search that is relevant to that link, then that will cause that result to be displayed more prominently and it will be coupled with how many users have “liked” that result. This will obviously encourage content creators to push their users to “like” a specific page on their site to hopefully affect how it may appear on Bing.
The third part of Bing’s Facebook integration is called “Enabling Conversation”, which seems the most interesting and is also the least straightforward aspect to this merger of services. Essentially, Bing wants to inform users of friends in their network who may be able to provide personal recommendations for a particular subject that a user is searching for. Perhaps someone is looking to move to a new city, so they are searching for apartments in that city. Bing will see this, search through that users network for someone who might be connected to that city somehow, and suggest to the user that this might be the guy they want to ask about apartments in Houston or what have you.
So, that’s what Bing and Facebook are getting up to. Come back tomorrow to read about how social media is also working into Google results.
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