Bing-Facebook Social Search Rollout Complete

All U.S. Bing users now have access to the new social search features added with the assistance of Facebook, the company announced today.

The new results, which incorporate Facebook Likes into Bing’s algorithm to serve you instantly personalized search results, began trickling out last week.

Bing announced a couple of changes from our initial coverage:

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. 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.

Facebook requires users to be 13 years of age or older to join the service. Bing originally limited profile search results to people 18 and older. Our customers told us is that if they already had a Facebook friend relationship with a person under 18, they would like those people to surface in Bing’s results as well. So we have changed that feature to allow any Facebook user who has these features active to show up in searches for their friends or friends of friends, which is more like the experience customers have within Facebook.

You should expect to see a “Liked by your Facebook friends” section in Bing’s universal results for some queries:

If you’re signed into Facebook but don’t want your results altered based on Facebook data when you search on Bing, all you have to do is hit the “Disable” option.

Need to test out the “people search” results more (which shows up at the top of the SERP under the heading “People on Facebook: [Name Here]” and also gives you an option to send a message via Facebook), as they are hit-or-miss so far. I searched for several Facebook friends and came up empty on about half. Perhaps this will improve over time.

What are your thoughts on the new Bing social search results?