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Facebook and Bing

Today we watched the Facebook webcast announcing their partnership with Bing.

The webcast was broadcast from Microsoft’s headquarters and Facebook CEO “Mark Zuckerburg” was there.  We had a lot of expectations for this webcast, and it ended up being fairly lackluster.  I know that Microsoft really wants to push Bing, as they said in the webcast “Microsoft is the underdog of search”, which is very true.  Microsoft’s first step into leveraging their 240 million dollar investment into Facebook (yes they own part of Facebook) was to have Facebook’s search results include “Web results” which are actually Bing’s search results.  Now Microsoft is including a new feature in Bing that is similar to what Google is doing with their social search feature.    Bing will include Facebook likes and other data into your Bing search results.  If you use Google and don’t plan to switch, this means nothing to you.  When you’re searching for a steak house, Bing will include like and other data from Facebook thats relevant to your search.  So you might search for local steak houses, a few web sites will show up, maybe some Yelp reviews and then it will include your Facebook friends Like and other data.

This makes search more personal and integrates your friends and family’s opinions on the search results.   I personally don’t believe this is a big deal, because its on Bing.  Bing is not that heavily uses, Google still represents the vast majority of search engine use.  Because Bing’s results are so bad, compared to Google, I don’t think this will mean much until Bing’s overall results improve.  One of the reasons the Bing and Google results are so drastically different is because they have much different “rules” or alorgithms, meaning the parameters and criteria the software on those sites use to determine the placement of a particular result in your search engine results list.  It comes down to which you favor, Google is still primarily based on web site results based on the information it gathers from those indidivual sites, leaving businesses and sites to “compete” for your information, Bing has much looser rules, but differ and almost go against Google’s rules, now they’re heavily integrating the social results.  Personally, I’m sticking with Google.