Yesterday, Facebook announced “Graph Search”, an ambitious project to allow searching Facebook for profile and “Like” driven information, and to expand Bing web search results when a Graph Search result comes up empty. Now today, Bing is announcing that they too are expanding their relationship with Facebook with more content in the Bing Social Sidebar.
Previously, if you had connected your Facebook login credentials through Bing, you would be able to see what your Facebook friends “Liked” in a sidebar along with more traditional search results, so a search for “Seattle restaurants” might show restaurants your friends had recommended via Facebook.
Now today, Bing is expanding those sidebar results to include “status updates, shared links and comments”. A post today on the Bing Search blog explains:
Starting today, five times more of your friends’ content on Facebook is searchable in the sidebar – including status updates, shared links, comments and photos from your friends. With the addition of status updates, shared links and comments to the sidebar, it’s now easier to see who knows and what they’ve shared related to your search. So when your friends aren’t around, Bing is the perfect stand-in.
The new social sidebar results, including images from Facebook, along with previously available relevant entries from other social services such as Twitter, Foursquare, Quora, Klout, and Google+ are already live here.