Nov 3, 2010 11:44 GMT  ·  By

Bing users will get a tailored search experience as Microsoft and Facebook have completed the deployment of new social features to the decision engine.

The new Bing social layer was announced almost a month ago, when the Redmond company also started rolling out search experience enhancements that it developed in partnership with Bing.

But in addition to the new social features on Bing, Facebook members will also be able to tap boosted search capabilities within the social networking hotspot.

However, for the time being, Bing’s evolution with the help of Facebook is only available to users in the United States.

“As with all the work we do at Bing, we have been focused on user feedback in an effort to make sure the features are really useful to customers, and we have made a couple of changes to the product that we want to make people aware of.

“Early users told us that they expected the same access to their friends inside Bing as they already have inside Facebook,” revealed Paul Yiu, Group Program Manager, Bing.

Some of the first features that went live in Bing involved search results enhanced with Facebook Likes as well as Facebook Profile search.

It appears that users were not really happy with friends that did not appear in the search results, even after the new features had been implemented.

The software giant tweaked this enhancements, striving to find a balance between returning Facebook users in search results, while also respecting their sharing limitations.

“Assuming you have selected to share information with your friends inside Facebook, you will show up in profile searches in Bing, even if you have selected not to have profile information show up in public search engines,” Yiu explained.

“This is similar behavior to the way Facebook works. It’s important to note that you will not show up in web searches on major search engines including Bing, just in Facebook Profile Searches within Bing conducted by your friends or friends of friends.”

In addition, the Redmond company also removed the restriction related to Facebook members being returned as results only if they were at least 18 years old.

As the new features are live, Bing search results will contain all Facebook users, 13 years and older.

“The way customers can control the features (turning them on and off) remains the same, and you can learn more about the features themselves at our learn more page,” Yiu added,

“We believe these changes will make the experience better for customers, allowing them to bring their friends with them into the Bing experience, making search more social, more personal and more useful.”