Bing and Facebook team up to make social searching a reality
Microsoft’s Bing search engine users are now getting some help from friends — that is, their Facebook friends.
Starting Wednesday, Bing will tie into users’ Facebook profiles in an effort to provide more relevant search results, in particular, users’ likes and the likes of friends.
The partnership will help users receive more personalized search results, which may turn out to be better for certain types of searches. For example, when a user is searching for a movie on Bing, he sees results that include how many Facebook friends “liked” the movie. Such results can extend to news articles, books, restaurants, music and a variety of other products. This partnership can provide Bing with an advantage over Google if the feature is well received by users and leads to greater use of Bing at the expense of Google.
Well, at least Bing has a claim to some sort of relevance now. But does anyone really want their search results determined by what your friends on Facebook are looking for? No offence to my Facebook friends, but not all of them are exactly Internet sleuths. I can find things online myself perfectly well, thank you very much.
