Bing has announced that they have created a whole new level of Facebook integration into their search results and have “designed a new way to experience search, focusing on great design, task completion, instant answers, and vertical categories like shopping and travel to help you make decisions faster.”
Bing states in their blog post that Research tells us that 90% of people seek advice from family and friends as part of the decision making process. This “Friend Effect” is apparent in most of our decisions and often outweighs other facts because people feel more confident, smarter and safer with the wisdom of their trusted circle.
In October 2010, Bing formed a partnership with social networking giant, Facebook that would allow Bing to use the Facbook social data and integrate them into Bing search queries. Initially, Bing was slow to integrate the data. In February of this year, Bing took a step towards more complete integration but still was not utilizing the full potential of the data that was available to them.
With the new update from Bing, search results can now be tailored to your Facebook profile based on your friends and even the collective Facebook network (not your FB friends).
Some of the biggest changes are:
- Receive personalized search results based on the opinions of your friends by simply signing into Facebook.
- You can see what your Facebook friends “like” across the Web
- Incorporate the collective know-how of the Web into your search results, and begin adding a more conversational aspect to your searches.
- You can quickly see what your friends like and are sharing.
- Showing which of your friends liked the search results given by Bing via Facebook.
- Bing will promote search results that are “liked” by your friends to the front page of the Bing personalized search results.
Google has used social media as a ranking signal for many months and continue to attempt to incorporate social media signals into their search results. Until Google has a popular social networking platform from which to draw data from, it looks as though Bing has taken the lead in personalized searches by utilizing Facebook social media data.