Facebook / Bing partnership: the official announcement, and video

Just in from Microsoft, the official announcement:

Today, in partnership with Facebook, Bing announced new social search features that provide a more personal search experience based on an individual’s Facebook network. In the offline world, we know people rely on friends for input and advice. Online, people are increasingly looking to their friends and social networks for advice and opinions, and search is a place many people go to find answers and complete tasks – making it a natural place for this information to come together.

These new social search features will be available when an individual is logged into Facebook while searching on Bing and will begin rolling out to users today, with full availability rolling out in the coming months. The new features include:

  • Liked Results. Now when customers search on Bing, they’ll see relevant links and results “Liked” by their Facebook friends, providing a unique and personal search experience for each user. Built on Facebook’s public “Like” platform, this feature shows searchers the pages or links that their friends found interesting for the search term. Bing takes advantage of a person’s social network to show personalized search results based on what their friends have liked or shared as a link on Facebook. These results appear in a box on the search results page and differ for each user depending on what their friends liked.
  • Facebook Profile Search. Conducting a search for an individual can be challenging, but Bing now surfaces information for people based on their relevancy to the searcher’s Facebook network and friends. When searching for an individual, Bing looks at a person’s Facebook network and surfaces results that make the most sense based on the relationships the searcher has with people on Facebook. For example, results for common names such as “Bob Smith” will be ranked higher if a person shares mutual friends or networks. This “social distance” is used to provide people with the most personally relevant answers for people searches.

and a video:

Get Microsoft Silverlight

Here are the blog posts: Bing Blog, Facebook Blog


LiveSide.net