Bing Partners with Klout on Social Search

Microsoft has added a lot of enhancements and new features to its Bing service, and some more of them are on their way to users.

On September 27th, the company announced a partnership with Klout aimed at expanding the social networking functionality of the search engine.

Bing has already got a nice set of social capabilities with the addition of a sidebar back in May, so as to enable users to stay close to their friends when it comes to finding what they are interested in and receiving some advice.

“Since then, we’ve added new partners and expanded our social data to include the top social networks on the web like Facebook, Twitter, foursquare and Quora – and we’re not done yet,” the company notes in a blog post.

The partnership with Klout is aimed at delivering a richer discovery of influencers across platforms, while also putting the people at the center.

“To help you find the right person we need to determine who is influential and trusted on different topics on the web. Bing and Klout share this vision. In addition to the technical partnership described below, we are announcing that we are making a strategic investment in Klout,” the company notes.

Klout already has a great social networking expertise, which will further enhance the combination of social and search that Bing has been providing for the past several months.

According to Microsoft, “along with the big science challenges around relevance and ranking (especially people ranking), there are exciting possibilities for what we can do together for web users. Our engineering teams will work together to expand the scope of social search and influence.”

Klout scores and influential topics will be displayed on Bing in the People Who Know section of the sidebar. Thus, users will benefit from help when looking for experts on topics they are searching for.

Bing highlights on a series of Klout users profiles will also be delivered, so as to demo the online influence of search.

“What’s interesting about our work on the Klout service is that for the 1st time Bing is an outbound signal for influence. Search as a new outbound signal is an interesting new development in the way we think about big data and how it can add value to lots of the other services we use each day,” Microsoft notes.

Other enhancements will also be brought to Bing as part of this partnership, Microsoft announced, adding that the ultimate goal was to enrich the discovery and recognition of influencers on both Bing and Klout.