Microsoft's alliance with Facebook seems to have one endgame: Beat Google. The latest effort, announced late yesterday, ties Bing search results to the Facebook social graph.
Bing + Facebook
Bing users will now see search results that have been influenced by what their Facebook friends have liked or shared.
For example, when a user searches for a website like Cooks.com, Bing will surface recipes within that site that their friends have recommended. Same goes for newspaper articles on sites like NYTimes.com. And when a user searches for a destination, Bing will surface friends' images of these locations if they've added any on Facebook, making it simple to navigate over and discuss them.
“It’s a first step in the evolution of how search can become more human,” said Stefan Weitz, a director of Bing at Microsoft.
The Competition
While Google has been on the social search tip for some time now, the most the Internet giant as been able to fully integrate is Flickr, Quora and Twitter. Integration with Facebook has always been very limited.
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Obviously, Microsoft hopes that its partnership with Facebook will push it higher than its rival.
Moreover, it was revealed in February that Google has begun to lose market share to Bing. The numbers are small but telling: Bing and Yahoo! Search achieved the highest success rates in January 2011. In other words, more than 81 percent of searches executed resulted in a visit to a Website. Meanwhile, Google achieved a lesser success rate of 65 percent.
More recently, Google accounted for 65.4 percent of searches in the United Statesin April, followed by Yahoo with 15.9 percent and Bing with 14.1percent, according to comScore. A year earlier, Google accounted for64.4 percent, followed by Yahoo with 17.7 percent, and Bing with11.8 percent.
Should Uncle G be worried? Let us know what you think.
