14 DAY TRIAL // Google is not the only search engine going social, Bing is taking the big plunge after dipping in toe in it last year. Microsoft has just announced a massive social overhaul, one that adds a lot more social features but, thankfully, also pushes them to the side, literally, away from the regular search results.
The redesign is rolling out to all users, in the US, in the next few weeks, but a few users may already be seeing them. There are plenty of new social features, some quite interesting. You can ask your Facebook friends stuff if the search engine isn't helping.
Alternatively, you can find people on Twitter, LinkedIn, even Google+, that may know more about the thing you're trying to find. And you can check out what the people you know are asking or whether they're responding to your own question.
Social is baked quite deep into Bing, but, while on the surface, that's exactly what Google has done earlier this year, the differences are quite interesting and probably give Bing an edge.
For one, most social activity is plucked from the search results and off to a new sidebar. It means that the results stay clean, but you can still find the new stuff if you want it.
Google, by contrast, mixes everything together making it hard to know which are the "social" results and which aren't.
Strike one for Bing, but there's more, social on Bing doesn't mean just Facebook or Twitter, it means a wide variety of social networks and sites.
Facebook gets top billing, of course, Microsoft has a deal with the social network and is a big investor in the company.
Bing also has a deal with Twitter to get full access to the "fire hose," all tweets and activity available in real time, as well as historic activity. Google has neither of those, so it's limiting itself to results from Google+.
But Bing also has results from Google+, from the public data, as well as from LinkedIn and everything else it can index. Google could do that, to a degree, but it doesn't. Another point for Bing.
Granted, it remains to be see how well all of this works in practice. And even if it's great and it's much better than Google, it doesn't mean people will start switching. But these things take time and Microsoft has sure been patient so far.