Microsoft’s Bing Internet search engine will display more results that include information from Facebook’s social network.
Answers to queries on the Bing site will feature five times more information gleaned from a user’s Facebook connections.
Last week, Facebook unveiled its own search “Graph” service, which also relies on Bing to deliver some results.
Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), an investor in Facebook (Nasdaq: FB), competes with Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) in the search market.
“Search is great at retrieving information from across the web to help you find what you’re looking for and get more done. But, more often than not, we look to the people we trust to help us make decisions and get stuff done,” the Bing team wrote in a blog.
“At Bing, we believe that for anything you want to get done on Bing, there is at least one person out there who can help. That’s why we introduced a new information architecture with a three column design that focuses on bringing you information from the web to help you take action and interact with friends without compromising the core search experience.”
In the new design, Bing says users “not only will find great search results about the city, but you’ll also find information from your friends who live or have visited in the sidebar. Now you know which of your friends might have the inside scoop on what to do, or better yet might want to join you. We think matching your search intent with relevant people and experts is a profound change to the way we use search, and can make it more useful than ever before.”
According to Big, “five times more of your friends’ content on Facebook is searchable in the sidebar – including status updates, shared links, comments and photos from your friends. With the addition of status updates, shared links and comments to the sidebar, it’s now easier to see who knows and what they’ve shared related to your search. So when your friends aren’t around, Bing is the perfect stand-in.”
Facebook’s Graph Search lets users discover people, photos, places and interests, Facebook (Nasdaq: FB) Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said in unveiling the new features last week.
The company showed how the service can be used by recruiters to find potential hires and by members seeking dating partners.
When fully rolled out, the tool will give many Web users an incentive to spend less time on Google, Yelp’s reviews and LinkedIn’s professional site. While Zuckerberg said the new feature could be a “business” in the future, he didn’t outline how it will make money soon.
Google, too, has tried to incorporate social features in its powerful search engine, but it doesn’t have the breadth of personal data that Facebook has amassed, the Associated Press noted in a review of Facebook’s new feature.
