Bing Goes Deeper into Social Search
May 17, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
It seems Microsoft may be in for a much-delayed social media breakthrough with a more socially searchable Bing. Reaping some of the rewards of its recent partnership with Facebook, Bing’s search results will be featuring a searcher’s Facebook friends’ Likes and Shares. The people at Bing are describing the new search layers as “conversational,” and adding, in the words of Bing director, Stephan Weitz, that “it’s a first step in the evolution of how search can become more human.”
Bing is en route to “humanization” by way of special highlights in its results alerting searchers to social media friends’ recommendations that coincide with one’s latest topic of inquiry. For example, as Weitz was helpfully paraphrased in the New York Times, if someone searches for a website “like NYTimes.com or Cooks.com, Bing will” produce “news articles or recipes deep inside those sites that … friends have recommended.” Moreover, the folks over at Microsoft not being ones to forget the ever-growing importance of location-based sociability, they are also piling on Bing a feature that will make note of which of a searcher’s friends live in a given city or other locale if it’s a destination being searched for. Microsoft may be, indeed, gaining some steam.
Read more:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/techchron/detail?entry_id=89057#ixzz1Mdz4qWW3
Bing Enhances “Liked” Search Results Feature
December 15, 2010 by admin · Comments Off
As part of the latest series of updates to Bing’s search engine, Microsoft today announced a new enhancement to its “Liked” search results feature. Originally introduced in November of this year, the “Liked” feature shows users which of their friends have “liked” relevant search results.
The recent enhancement has expanded the results to include more sites. In addition, “Starting today, if your search results include a specific link that has also been ‘liked’ by someone in your Facebook network the link will be highlighted as ‘Liked’ within Bing,” wrote Paul Yiu, Group Program Manager at Bing, on a company blog.
“This gets especially interesting for a query like ‘Xbox’ where my friend ‘Liked’ the ‘Kinect’ site and while our algorithms didn’t feel it was relevant enough to make it the ‘answer’ we reference above, we are still able to indicate that my friend liked that link that happened to show up within the results.”
Updated Bing App Goes Social
June 23, 2010 by admin · Comments Off
Microsoft Bing yesterday announced an updated version of the Bing app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Among its many new features, the new version of the app allows users to connect their Facebook and Twitter accounts and view combined status updates from within the app.
In addition, the updated Bing app will include relevant social network results along with traditional web results. When searching for a movie, for example, the results will feature official movie show times along with comments from social networking sites that friends may have said about the movie. The updated Bing app for the iPhone and iPod Touch also features visual scanning, the ability to scan barcodes and cover art to view descriptions, reviews, prices and links to merchant websites.
People can download the update today using iTunes.
Bing adds Real-Time Twitter to Search Results
June 7, 2009 by admin · Comments Off
As part of an effort to integrate real-time data into search results, Microsoft has announced that its one-month-old search engine Bing now includes the latest tweets of Twitter users. While Bing will not feature all of Twitter at this time, it will index a few thousand of the more prominent Twitterers based on their follower count and volume of Tweets. The list of Twitter users includes everyone from search technology journalist Danny Sullivan to people like Al Gore and Ashton Kutcher.
In a blog post about the announcement, general manager of Microsoft’s search technology center Sean Suchter wrote, “There has been much discussion of real-time search and the premium on immediacy of data that has been created primarily by Twitter. We’ve been watching this phenomenon with great interest, and listening carefully to what consumers really want in this space.”
When Bing users search for people in association with Twitter, the search results will bring up their latest Tweets along with a quick link to more tweets. Users can type in queries such as “Ashton Kutcher Twitter” or “Ashton Kutcher tweets.”
This is a major step for Bing in terms of competing with search giant Google. The New York Times reported that while all major search engines index Twitter profiles and some older tweets, “Bing is the first major search engine that is integrating with Twitter in this way.”
-Melanie Saxe
