Calling it the unfolding of a new era of social search, Bing today revealed big changes to their search results. Bing and Facebook are teaming up to better personalize search results, to essentially serve everyone a different search experience, based on the Likes of their Facebook friends.
Bing will add a “Liked By Your Friends” module to the search results, which will affect what results are served, as long as you’re also logged into your Facebook account when you search. Depending on what you’re searching for, you might see stories that your friends Liked — sometimes the module will be located at the top, sometimes the bottom, sometimes not at all — ranked based on relevancy.
Current Bing Results vs. New Bing Results
Using a steak restaurant as an example, Bing’s results today serve a list of restaurants with maps, phone numbers, and reviews:
But adding in Liked Results could help you discover a restaurant your friends like:
People Search
Bing is also aiming to make finding people you might know easier. Bing says that results for name queries (1 billion every month) provide a poor user experience on all search engines unless you’re looking for a public figure, and searchers are only satisfied 20 percent of the time.
Bing will integrate public information from your friends Facebook profiles into your search results, such as location, high school, college, work info, and friends, in an effort to help narrow down your results. You can also now add a friend or send them a message from Bing’s results.
Privacy
Bing also stressed privacy, saying that Bing will not share any information on searches with Facebook. Bing said they will only connect with the people you know in your Facebook network to bring you content they have Liked.
Also, as the Instant Personalization begins, a pop up will greet searchers, asking searchers if they want a personalized search experience based on Like data included in their results. If not, Bing will shut it down.
These new search features should be live shortly.
ClickZ also provides more coverage in “Bing Deal Could Extend Reach for Businesses on Facebook.”