Last year, Microsoft collaborated with the social networking giant Facebook to discover more things with your friend’s ‘Like’. Microsoft is now expanding the Facebook “Liked Results” which promotes the links shared or liked by your friends via Facebook.
This is very interesting because for the first time in the history, a persons social circle, his relationships with colleagues, friends and his reputation in the society will impact the search over the internet.
This is the first time in human history that people are leaving social traces that machines can read and learn from, and present enhanced online experiences based on those traces. As people spend more time online and integrate their offline and online worlds, they will want their friends’ social activity and their social data to help them in making better decisions. Integrating with Twitter data 16 months ago was one step, and exploring Facebook’s rich streams is another. 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, says Bing.
This could be Bing’s biggest bet as this feature of search is going to be largely dependent on the Facebook Likes! The popularity of the Facebook in the near future will definitely impact Microsoft revenues. What’s more interesting to me is that how different it will be from Google’s Real Time search which is also in the nascent stage.
Microsoft Fused Labs and Facebook have earlier also come together to offer better solutions like Docs.com, but it has not caught on as much as one would have liked it to be. Microsoft is now hoping that this time, linking Bing’s search results with Facebook’s will be a coup of sorts which Google may find difficult to leap over.
