Bing Adds Social Vertical to Search Facebook and Twitter

Microsoft has just climbed at the top of the search social ladder. The Redmond company debuted Bing Social (bing.com/social) into Beta stage, essentially unveiling a social vertical to its search/decision engine. Bing Social allows users to dig through Twitter and Facebook for information better than any other search engine on the market today, according to the software giant. Unveiled at the Search Marketing Expo Advanced by Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president, Microsoft Online Audience Business, Bing Social is now available for testing.

“You're able to now harness the power of what's going on in the social community to help you make better decisions. We have here through our partnership with Facebook and Twitter the best access to the social information, better than what's offered in any other search engine. So, if you want to really figure out what's going on in real time, we're going to launch this shortly, and it will be pretty good,” Mehdi stated.

Bing Social integrated both Twitter and Facebook with non-pages content. This means that Bing will return tweets, but also status updates and shared links grabbed from Facebook fan pages. At the same time, Microsoft has worked to ensure that the privacy of Twitter and Facebook users is respected. “For non-fan pages, we only surface popular shared links from Facebook users in the aggregate form, and only from users who have set their status updates to be shared with “everyone.” No names or photos, or even the text in the update associated with the link are published – just the link in aggregate,” explained Lawrence Kim, from the Bing team.

The Bing Social page offers a chance not only to search Twitter and Facebook, but to also view the hottest social topics. At the same time, users have the possibility to filter content according to timeframe and source. “Finally, we’re introducing a re-designed homepage that shows improved trending topics derived from both Twitter and Facebook data. For each trending topic, we also show information about why it’s trending, a snippet of results from our social corpus, followed by query refiners on the bottom,” Kim added.