On Wednesday, Facebook and Microsoft jointly announced new "social" functionality within the Bing search engine.
This is a really interesting development which highlights the value of Microsoft's stake in Facebook and Facebook's desire to move beyond social networking. This is another example of the "Facebook layer" which I blogged about previously.
By adding personalized search results based on users' Facebook connections, Bing is narrowing the results in hopes that it will enable users to get to the information they are seeking more quickly. Also (and I admittedly not certain whether this is a new feature), if you search for a person on Bing now, next to the search result related to that individual's Facebook profile, there is an option to add this person as a friend directly from Bing.
It will be interesting to see whether this enhanced user customization enables Bing to eat into some of Google's market share.
2 points that come to mind with this.
ReplyDelete1) Is this really going to be a two-way exchange of information between Facebook and Bing? The article mentions
"In the near future, Bing also hopes to be able to find topic experts among your friends and highlight relevant search results from sites and stories that they liked."
So is the next step to have the capabilities of seeing what your friends are searching for from their Bing search engines? According to Mark Zuckerberg and Yusuf Mehdi (Microsoft's Senior VP of Online Audience Business), the answer is no...for now.
2) This has got to give Bing a marketing advantage to tap into the pool of "likes" on Facebook. I can imagine customized ads being developed not just off of what you're searching for, but also considering what your friends like.
It makes sense that they're moving in this direction, but I'm not sure how much of dent this will do to Google's market share. However, I do agree with Andrej that it's a huge advantage to tap into the Facebook "likes" for ad customization. In regards to the potential that they would allow people to see what their friends are searching, I think most people would see that as an invasion of privacy.
ReplyDeleteThe social exchange of links also makes sense in light of this recent post when the free bookmark syncing service Xmarks was shutting down (but is apparently not dead yet…). They were primarily interested in some way to monetize the bookmarking data collected on their servers.
ReplyDelete“The first thing we built was a search engine. It turned out amazing results, but only for certain types of queries. It was terrible at finding facts. But if you were looking for the websites in a particular category, the results were shockingly complete and entirely spam-free. Looking for the list of all auto manufacturers? Or presidential libraries? Or art supply sites? A casual comparison of our results with those of the major search engines would convince you that we were on to something.”
If Bing can take the best of both worlds - spam-free, social links for categories and fact finding of traditional web scraping - they could be really onto something.