It looks like Microsoft’s Bing may have just upped the ante for search on the iPhone by fully embracing two of the largest social networks in the US.
Now you can connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts and see combined status updates from your friends from within the Bing app. But that’s easy. When we asked what else we could do with this personal intelligence, we looked at the data behind how people were using their social networks. Turns out that over 40% of the time when people ask ambiguous queries that don’t have a defined answer (like where should I go to eat tonight), social networks are faster at providing a great answer than traditional search engines. (Bing Community Blog)
Although Google has already included Twitter within their search engine results, Bing’s personal integration of Facebook and Twitter should make the latter more relevant against the search Titan (who is looking rather bland).
Social integration wasn’t the only feature Bing offered users, as they have also included a feature that may help the smaller rival compete against Google Goggles.
[S]peaking of finding products, the iPhone app now features visual scanning of barcodes and cover art. Use the camera on your iPhone to scan the barcode of any product or the cover art of books, CDs, DVDs, or video games. You’ll see descriptions, and often reviews, prices, and links to merchant websites. This feature makes it easy to comparison shop for your favorite products or just find a place to buy that book your friend won’t shut up about. (Bing Community Blog)
While Google does have something similar for Android lovers, their native iPhone app is currently lacking in the product location department, which may help convince users to defect to Microsoft for the sake of convenience.
Currently the Bing iPhone app is available for US users only (which means my European friends are out of luck unfortunately) so its presence will probably do little to threaten Google globally.
However if Bing can improve their search engine as well as voice search (which is still sub par when compared against Google), we may see Microsoft finally dethrone Google as the number one search engine in the US.
(via TechCrunch)
Originally posted on June 22, 2010 @ 1:47 pm