Microsoft established a deep relationship with Facebook on Wednesday, connecting search results with the “likes” that a user’s Facebook friends express.
Bing will now detect if a user is logged into Facebook, and then may show a three- or four-line module within Web search results that will show the user’s recommendations, including favorite restaurants and movies. In the future, individual search results will include “likes,” and Bing will work to establish some of those users as experts.
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Before that, however, users will be asked to link the two sites via a pop-up on Bing. Searches will not be shared via Facebook, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said. And as for privacy, only public information is shared. “Nobody can see [any] information about you that 500 million people cannot see if they go to your profile,” Zuckerberg said.
Microsoft executives positioned the integration as a way to enhance the company’s push to present Bing as a “decision engine” rather than a search engine. Executives characterized the partnership as “a start,” and said it had been implemented in just two weeks.
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By and large, today’s form of search serves as a gateway to discover what’s available in the Web, said Qi Lu, president of Microsoft’s Online Services Group. “For Bing, our aspiration is to go substantially beyond that,” Lu said, to “make informed decisions faster”.
The intellectual heritage of today’s consumer Web was to publish and attach to documents, Lu said. Today’s Web is a fundamentally topical network, linked together by hyperlinks. But those hyperlinks are characterized by anchor text, the most important part of the Web, he said.
“If you go beyond looking for a search or a product, the search experience isn’t very good,” he said.
At the same time, Lu said he sees the Web evolving into the “Web of the world,” places, things, and people. Of all the forces driving the Web, the strongest is Facebook sharing information, sharing the path, and sharing the products, he said. The “like buttons” and other products start to overlay events and other information, Lu said, allowing users not only to find and discover information, but to make better decisions.
A classic search problem is name queries, Lu said. By combining Facebook and Bing, that experience will be dramatically better. “We will be in a position to tackle that partnership over time,” Chu said.
“When you go to Bing to search, you bring the power of Facebook with you,” Lu added.
In the past, Facebook searches returned results within Facebook, Mehdi said, which would show Bing results within an iFrame.
The second phase came about when users wanted to know what was going on with the community at large, with 25 million pieces of content being created each day. Microsoft’s Bing Social, like other sites, tracks the hottest topics on the Web, displaying the top links that are being shared.
Meanwhile, Microsoft and Facebook have an established partnership that goes back a number of years. In October 2007, Microsoft invested $240 million into Facebook, and Bing now provides search results for Web searches made within Bing. Bing also supports other functions with Facebook, like Maps, Zuckerberg said. He said that Microsoft was doing “awesome things” to try and innovate its way into more market share, while other, more established search vendors – Google, by inference – were merely trying to hold on.
Zuckerberg called the partnership one of the “most exciting” that Facebook has ever signed.
So what’s new?
Bing has added a module that shows a link or two of articles or content that has been liked by your friends on the Web. “We have brought the likes of your social group into search that you can’t find anywhere else,” said Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of the Online Audience Business for Microsoft.
Bing has also ranked the module itself, to make it show up in different places on the page depending on what you’re searching for, and the relevancy of that social search.
“Those things will profoundly change how we present search,” Mehdi said.
Mehdi showed a restaurant review that wasn’t actually recommended by Bing, but appeared in the module because the friends liked it. The module also appeared when searching for a movie recommendation, to reflect that others had either liked or disliked it. Users will also be able to ping the user who made the recommendation on Facebook and get more information.
Users can type in a search for a name, like “Brian Lee” (click right for larger image). Before, Bing linked to a page of search results, such as a popular hockey defenseman. “What we plan to do is bring in Facebook profiles right into search results,” Mehdi said.
Both of those modules should be live, he said.
New users will receive a pop-up in the upper right-hand corner asking users if they want to link their Facebook account.
What’s to come? In the near term, Bing wants to bring in face image shots as well as friends who liked a result. Further out, Bing wants to establish people as experts on a given topic, to give a better understanding of a given topic.
In other Bing news, Microsoft said recently that the company has folded its Live Labs team into the main Bing development engine, in an undated note on the LiveLabs Web site.
“After nearly five years as a lab within Microsoft, the Live Labs team is transitioning to Bing, where we’ll play a more direct role in future Bing innovations,” the note said.
“We’re looking forward to contributing our web UX and data visualization know-how to improve your Bing experience. Our transition to Bing and the associated details will be worked out through the remainder of October.”
