Microsoft expanded the partnership between its Bing search engine and Facebook by adding Facebook “likes” to any URL returned by its search engine in the U.S.
As a result, friends’ “likes” will be integrated into Bing search results. If you search for hotels in Napa, for instance, you’ll see the regular list of search results, but you might also see your friends’ Facebook photos under certain returns (below) with a note that says they have liked this particular hotel on Facebook.
“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,” the Bing team wrote in a blog post
Microsoft said the effort is “part of a longer journey” that will incorporate social interactions into search.
“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,” Lawrence Kim, the principal program manager for social search, said in a post on the Bing Team blog. “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.”
Microsoft had originally unveiled the social features back in October of last year at a press conference with Bing execs and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The company rolled them out to U.S. users three weeks later.
➡ The number of “liked results” you see on Bing naturally depends on the number of friends you have on Facebook and how often those friends “like” things.