Microsoft and Facebook announced their partnership October last year and their partnership’s offering to include Facebook Likes to make search more social will roll out today. Facebook Likes will now be included in search on Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Web search today is dominated by Google with close to 65% of the global market share. Microsoft and Yahoo account for close to 15% each. Including Facebook likes in search result display definitely gives a unique feature-add on to Bing search. Microsoft earlier this year announced that Bing would be the default search engine for Blackberry phones. Here’s what the new features will add.
To get started the user will have to open two tabs in the browser, in one tab sign in to Facebook and the other tab sign in to Bing. The searches that are performed will show a ‘Like’ notification from Facebook that your friends may have liked. If your friends have not liked a search result then it will show the number of people from Facebook that like the search result. If you search for a city that your friends live in, it’ll show information about the friends activities in the city and a whole lot of other features.
Microsoft claims that people need search to be more social, and it’s right! Google too has been recently trying to build its own user recommended search result by adding the ‘+1’ button. +1 is Google’s attempt at making search more social. Microsoft clearly has an advantage right now, considering the number of people on Facebook already using the Like button regularly to create a huge user generated search preference database. Google has been losing market slowly but steadily since Bing was launched.
A new more improved social search engine will definitely give a competitive advantage to Microsoft over Google.
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