Bing first inked a deal with Facebook to make search more social last October. At that time, Microsoft announced an integration between Bing and Facebook’s search that brings information from a searcher’s Facebook friends into search results on Bing.
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Now Bing and Facebook are playing even nicer with a Liked Results feature.
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Liked Results promotes links your friends have publicly liked or shared via Facebook. The new Bing-Facebook effort lets Liked Results annotate any of the URLs returned by Bing’s algorithmic search results to all users in the United States.
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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, said Lawrence Kim of the Bing social team. 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.
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Making Decisions Easier
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If your friends have publicly liked or shared any of the algorithmic search results shown on Bing, the decision engine displays them right below the results. This is similar to Google Social Search results.
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If you are planning a trip to Alaska, for example, and you want to find a great hotel, a traditional search would show you a long list of web links and captions. With the Like Results option, you would see any hotels in Alaska that your friends liked, along with their name and photo. That’s supposed to make it easier for you to decide which hotel to choose.
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You may not see Liked Results on every query, but when it does trigger, it’s often a delightful experience, Kim said. We are hoping that it will make searching on Bing more effortless and enjoyable.
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Word-of-Mouth Marketing
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Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market…