Instead of mimicking Google’s insta-search (which would probably be a huge engineering challenge in of itself), Microsoft has decided to “out Google” Google by leverage the one asset the search giant has been unable to obtain.
A few months ago, we announced an exciting partnership with Facebook to make search more social. As part of that work, we introduced Liked Results, which promotes links your friends have publicly liked or shared via Facebook. Today we are extending Liked Results to annotate any of the URLs returned by our algorithmic search results to all users in the US.
If your friends have publicly liked or shared any of the algorithmic search results shown on Bing, we will now surface them right below the result. (Bing! Community Blog)
Combined with the partnership with Twitter, Bing! is as close to a social search engine as we will probably see in the next few years (provided Facebook doesn’t launch their own competing engine).
Unfortunately once again this is only available for American users, although hopefully the company will consider expanding this feature to the rest of the planet as Facebook’s user base extends beyond the shores of the US.
While their rival Google can rely upon its superior resources (not to mention tapping into Twitter as well), the search giant’s lack of a decent social graph could prove to be a major hurdle down the road as users rely more upon social friends than sophisticated machines to filter their search queries.
(hat tip: Mashable)
Originally posted on February 24, 2011 @ 8:12 pm
Besides the obvious choices like facebook and bing, there are other sites such as http://www.buddyfetch.com You can search by hobby, interest, profession and so many more ways to use it! I used to to find a person in russia that I could pen pal with for my college course!
-Craig