14 DAY TRIAL // Look at a variety of web destinations, and you’re bound to only agree that users tend to trust the opinions, advice, reviews, etc. of other users, even when they don’t necessarily know them. Now imagine the next step in the evolution of this inherent trust. How about being able to access information from people you actually know, respect and even friend?
Such an enhanced search experience is now becoming possible on Bing for all users across the US.
“We are extending Liked Results to annotate any of the URLs returned by our algorithmic search results to all users in the US,” reveals Lawrence Kim, from the Bing Social Team.
“If your friends have publicly liked or shared any of the algorithmic search results shown on Bing, we will now surface them right below the result.”
Bing’s social evolution enables users to take advantage of additional information shared by their Facebook friends, right in Microsoft’s search / decision engine.
This is a new step forward for the Microsoft and Facebook partnership that started contouring with the introduction of Liked Results.
Bing users will be able to filter results and make better decision based on the information returned to their queries thanks to the social data from Facebook. Think of it as social metadata.
“While we are very excited to talk about our next development, we’re all aware that it’s all part of a longer journey,” Kim adds.
“This is the first time in human history that people are leaving social traces that machines can read and learn from, and present enhanced online experiences based on those traces.
“As people spend more time online and integrate their offline and online worlds, they will want their friends’ social activity and their social data to help them in making better decisions. Integrating with Twitter data 16 months ago was one step, and exploring Facebook’s rich streams is another.”
Kim also notes that this is not the last search enhancement for Bing resulting from the partnership between Microsoft and Facebook.
In this regard however, the Redmond company has yet to unveil its future plans, although it’s safe to say that Bing will certainly dig deeper and deeper into Facebook and integrate as much as the social universe as possible.