Facebook and Microsoft team up with Bing Search

Wednesday, October 13th, 2010 By

Bing

Microsoft's Bing and Facebook will soon integrate search results. Image: Flickr / search-engine-land / CC-BY

In a joint announcement today, Microsoft’s Bing search engine and Facebook have announced a partnership. Bing will integrate social network search into its personalized results. Microsoft is hoping the Facebook partnership will help it overtake Google.

Facebook partnership for Bing

Facebook will now be integrating Bing search results and visa-versa. Microsoft and Facebook outlined two of the biggest features during their press announcement today. First, if searching for a person, Bing will use your Facebook profile to return results of people you are most likely to know. Called “social distance,” this feature makes decisions based on your friends list. Second, Bing will rate search results based on what your friends and social network have “liked” on Facebook. This individual ranking of search results will be done when your Facebook and Bing accounts are linked — either through Facebook connect or a similar feature.

The expansion of Microsoft’s Bing

The announcement of Bing’s integration of Facebook comes as Microsoft is trying to wrestle search market share away from Google. Bing is also currently integrating with Yahoo! search results. These two moves make Bing the strongest competitor so far to Google’s search rankings and results. Microsoft has been making very calculated moves to try to take over the search results market. It appears that Google and Bing will be duking it out for a long time to come. Following the announcement, Microsoft shares rose 65 cents apiece.

Turning off the Facebook integration

If you do not want your Facebook and Bing search results integrated, the companies are offering a way to turn off the linking feature. The details of exactly how this will work for users have not been outlined yet, however. This means once the Facebook/Bing search integration is turned on, you will most likely need to readjust your privacy settings on both websites to ensure your results return as you wish.

Sources

USA Today
Bloomburg News

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  • David Johnston

    This is a smart move by Microsoft. All they have to do now is get TV's to run Windows. Oh, actually that may be bad. :) Well, maybe at some point they will at least cross PPC markets also. That would be a nice touch.

    I am a little surprised that Bing made this move before Google. Pretty clever. Facebook is going to outgrow all other websites period. It was lacking a good information source in their search function and now they are taking care of that. It's going to be good for users. I know I tried to search for stuff in Facebook before and couldn't find anything meaningful.