May 10, 2013 at 5:06pm ET by Greg Finn

A new Facebook/Bing integration today will further entrench Facebook data into Bing results. Users are now able to interact with Facebook directly within the Bing Search Results Pages, in more than the usual one-way, read-only context. When a logged in user performs a Bing search for a query the social sidebar will show on the right rail outside of the main search pane. The new functionality will allow users to like the post, comment on the post and hop right over to the post on Facebook. According to Bing, the new integration will be a more usable and helpful experience: "Follo [...]

Klout Integration Pushes Human Powered ‘Expert’ Answers Atop Bing’s Search Results

May 8, 2013 at 12:15pm ET by Greg Finn

From Yahoo! to Facebook to Quora, social sites have long been struggling to leverage the Q&A format successfully. Today Klout officially enters the 'social answers' space with a unique proposition, integration with Bing search -- outside of the social search bar and into a big bold listing within the main search pane. The new 'Klout Experts' product leverages answers from top Klout users and influencers. These top Klout users have been asked questions that prompt a simple 300 character response directed to a topic that the user is influential in. For example, a photographer may [...]

Microsoft’s ViralSearch: Search Engine For Measuring Tweets & Viral Content

Mar 6, 2013 at 2:45pm ET by Barry Schwartz

VentureBeat reports Microsoft announced a new research project named ViralSearch. ViralSearch lets you search and navigate cascades of people passing content on social media and distinguish between things that are not just popular but also became viral in a sense that they are being passed from one person to the next over many generations. ViralSearch does this by analyzing news, videos, and photos shared within Twitter. It looks to see how many shares there were throughout the user base, over time and over generations of users. For example, in this screen shot, it shows a story Tim O [...]

Bing Tags Expands, Makes Pages Linked To Your Profile Public

Jan 22, 2013 at 1:52pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Search engines continue to go old school, encouraging people to "tag" content in a way that makes it feel like it's 1999 all over again. Today, Bing makes another push in that direction, making content you tag with "Bing Tags" more visibile. Honestly, I feel like this tagging crazy is simply Google and Bing falling down on the job. It used to be that we praised search engines for moving away from the tagging that was popular with them in the mid-to-late 1990s. That's because they were getting smart enough to know that every word on a page was effectively a tag rather than forcing human bein [...]

Bing Adds 5X More Facebook Content To Social Sidebar

Jan 17, 2013 at 12:00pm ET by Greg Sterling

The big news in search this week was the announcement of Facebook's Graph Search. But today, Microsoft is making enhancements to its own "social search" capability. Specifically, Bing is adding more content to its Social Sidebar feature. In a way, this is a reintroduction of Social Sidebar following the news of Facebook's Graph Search. People will now be able to see considerably more Facebook data surface in Social Sidebar. This will include Facebook status updates, comments and shared links in addition to the Facebook content already present (i.e., Likes, photos, etc.). Microsoft said t [...]

Bing’s Social Sidebar Lands On The iPad

Dec 14, 2012 at 3:07pm ET by Matt McGee

Bing has announced that searchers on the iPad will start seeing its "social sidebar" over the next few days. That includes the iPad Mini. Today's announcement comes just days after Bing finalized a new design for those social results. The social sidebar integrates friend and expert content from a variety of social sources that might be relevant to a user's search term. Bing says the display will adjust appropriately for either portrait or landscape mode. Here's a screenshot from Bing's announcement: As always, searchers will need to login to/authenticate their Facebook account [...]

Official: Bing Updates Social Sidebar Design

Dec 11, 2012 at 2:12pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Bing has officially announced they have redesigned the search results screen and social sidebar to help improve usability of the page. The changes include: The social results on the right are now clearly labelled as "Social Results" The search results on the left are now left-justified Addition of a + more link to expand the results to see more. We saw this was coming in tests that were leaked a few weeks ago. In that story, Danny Sullivan digs deeper into the main changes. Here are screen shots of before and after: Before: After: Related Articles: Bing T [...]

Bing Testing Social Sidebar With New Look, More Answers

Nov 23, 2012 at 2:17pm ET by Danny Sullivan

It's been about six months since Bing unveiled its Social Sidebar, and the search engine is now testing a new format that drops the gray background and which shows more matching content from friends and social networks. Before & After Here's an example of how the Social Sidebar still looks for most people: Here's the "after" view, or how it appears to the tiny number of people seeing the new look: The Visual Changes In terms of visual changes, the new format: Replaces the gray background to keep the sidebar with the same white background as the rest of the search page Re [...]

Bing Launched Elections Portal: Filter News By Party, Social Integration, Maps & More

Oct 26, 2012 at 9:18am ET by Barry Schwartz

Bing announced on their search blog a new portal for tracking the US Presidential Elections at bing.com/elections. The portal has some nice search features, such as the ability to filter news sources by your political views. The downside of this news filter is that only specific news outlets are included, such as Politico, Real Clear Politics, The Cook Political Report, Huffington Post and Associated Press. But nevertheless, it is nice to be able to filter your news sources and stories by political view. Bing has this slider that lets you change the stories to be more left or right wing [...]

Bing Now Handpicks News Writers For Its Social Sidebar

Oct 5, 2012 at 4:23pm ET by Matt McGee

Bing is dipping its toes into a form of what Google calls "authorship" with today's announcement that news writers are now being featured in Bing's Social Sidebar. U.S.-based searchers can now see journalists appearing in the "People Who Know" section of the Bing sidebar. These authors are often mixed in with those who appeared in "People Who Know" before -- people who've answered questions on Quora or who tweet regularly about the search topic. Here's a search I just did for "seattle mariners," which shows two authors in "People Who Know" along with several others. Those who are [...]

Bing’s Social Sidebar Gains Klout Scores & People Recommendations

Sep 27, 2012 at 3:44pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Klout has become the latest social service to be integrated into the new Bing Social Sidebar that was launched earlier this year. Bing says that Klout scores will now appear next to people surfaced in the sidebar, plus Klout's data will be used to help determine some of the people who show. From Bing's post: On Bing, we will surface Klout scores and influential topics for many of the experts in the People Who Know section of the sidebar. Klout as a social influence signal in the sidebar will really help customers connect with the right experts on the topics they are searching for. Here's [...]

Zuckerberg On Search: “At Some Point, We’ll Do It” & Be “Uniquely Positioned”

Sep 11, 2012 at 5:50pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Waiting for a Facebook search engine? Eventually, it'll arrive, says Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. But it might not be what you expect. Speaking in an interview today at TechCrunch Disrupt with Mike Arrington, Zuckerberg said that Facebook is doing a billion searches per day, "and we're not even trying." Most searches are, as we’ve heard in the past, really people searching for other people. But there are also searches for brands. "There’s a big opportunity there," Zuckerberg said, of going beyond people search. But the opportunity might not be to build a search engines as they� [...]

Search Facebook Friends’ Photos On Bing

Aug 30, 2012 at 3:04pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Microsoft announced on the Bing Search blog that you can now search Bing to discover your friends' photos within Facebook. If you activated the social bar within Bing and enabled Facebook to connect to Bing, then your search results in the Bing social bar may have photos from your friends' Facebook feeds. You can also browse and search Facebook photos directly at bing.com/friendsphotos. Here is a screen shot of how it looks in the Bing Social Bar: Here is a screen shot of the full Bing Friends' Photos search page: Microsoft says "your Facebook privacy settings are alw [...]

Bing Brings Quora Content Into Its Social Sidebar

Aug 22, 2012 at 2:40pm ET by Matt McGee

Bing continues to expand the content that may show up in its social sidebar, with news today that its Quora integration is complete. The integration involves Bing showing top Quora contributors in the sidebar when there's Q&A content on Quora that's related to the Bing search term, much like the sidebar might show content from Facebook or Twitter if that's relative to the search. Here's a screenshot of integration that's being shown on both Bing's and Quora's announcement: Quora isn't a new partner for Bing; it was included in the partner list when Bing originally announced the s [...]

Bing Adds Friend-Tagging To Social Sidebar

Jul 30, 2012 at 3:10pm ET by Matt McGee

Bing has just announced a small tweak to how its Social Sidebar functions -- but it's one that overcomes one of the Sidebar's true limitations. The change is this: When using the Social Sidebar, you can now tag up to five Facebook friends with whom you want to share your search results. Before this change, the Sidebar would automatically show a few connections under the "Friends Who Might Know" or "People Who Know" tabs. But you were limited to notifying/asking those suggestions, or to asking all of your friends at once via the "Ask Friends" feature. And that was hit and miss, because there [...]

Foursquare Tips Now Integrated Into Bing’s Social Sidebar

Jul 18, 2012 at 1:24pm ET by Greg Finn

In May Bing rolled out its new social sidebar that tied together social data from both Facebook and Twitter. Today another source has been added to the mix. Bing announced that Foursquare tips will be tied into specific location based queries. The Foursquare data will appear in the 'People Who Know' section of the sidebar, directly within the results pages: The Foursquare data pulled will be from the 'tips" area of each location, no information was given about check-in data. Of course the tips shown will be customized to the users location and the topic they are searching for. Th [...]

Bing’s New Social-Friendly Search Interface Now Live

May 15, 2012 at 7:31pm ET by Matt McGee

The new Bing interface, with a healthy dose of social connections and discovery, is now live for all users. Bing's announcement today says that anyone can access the new interface at www.bing.com/new, but you should also see a new message atop the Bing home page that invites you to try "the best search, now with people from your social networks." Even without clicking the "Check it out" link or first going to www.bing.com/new, I was shown the new, three-column display on a search for "seattle restaurants." When Bing announced the new interface last week, it included "Snapshots" - [...]

Head-To-Head: Bing’s Social Search Vs. Google’s Search Plus Your World

May 10, 2012 at 1:00pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Earlier this year, Google made its results more social with Search Plus Your World. Now Bing has reshaped how it handles social information as part of its "The New Bing" launch. Which does better, Google's blended search+search model or Bing's more segregated approach. Let's look at some examples. Hey Google, How's New Girl? I thought I'd start with a search for New Girl. It's a great show. I should know. I was a Fan of the Week. What's Google show me? The arrows point at things that have come because of social connections, and I'm only going to focus on these things, in this head-to-he [...]

Bing Relaunches, Features New Social Sidebar, Snapshots

May 10, 2012 at 1:00pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Bing announced a relaunch of its search engine today, with a big emphasis on bringing social into search. But wait! Didn't Bing already have social as part of its search experience? Yes, but now the search engine hopes to do it better, especially by largely off-loading social elements into a new sidebar area. The new features will appear for Bing users in the United States the coming days, taking several weeks to go live fully for everyone. Postscript: The new Bing should now be live for everyone. If you don't have it, see the instructions here: Bing’s New Social-Friendly Search Interfa [...]

How People Power (& Personalize) Bing’s Social Search

Mar 13, 2012 at 8:32am ET by Greg Finn

The good folks over at Stone Temple Consulting released an in-depth interview with Bing's Principal Group Program Manager for Bing Social Search, Paul Yiu. The Bing social search team integrates social content and indicators into the search results to add both personalization and relevance to the search results. Bing currently ties in data from both Facebook and Twitter to improve the overall quality of the results. In contrast, Google only ties Google+ data into their search results pages. Eric Enge performed the interview for Stone Temple and didn't pull any punches on social indica [...]

Get Our News, Everywhere!

Follow @sengineland

Got a tip? Tell us here!

Most Likes
Most Tweets
Comments

Our Stories Being Liked on Facebook

Search Engine Land Sponsors

Advertise With Us

Free Daily Search News Recap!

SearchCap is a once-per-day newsletter update - sign up below and get the news delivered to you!

Click to watch SMX conference video

Join us at an upcoming SMX event:

North America

SMX Advanced - June 11-12, 2013
SMX East - Oct. 1-3, 2013
SMX Social Media Marketing - Nov. 7-8 2013
SMX West - March 11-13, 2014
SMX Toronto - March 2014

EMEA

SMX London - May 15-16, 2013
SMX Paris - June 6-7, 2013
SMX Stockholm - Oct. 14-15, 2013
SMX Milan - Novemeber 7-8, 2013
SMX Israel - January 2014
SMX Munich - April 2014

APAC

SMX Sydney - April 2014

Search Engine Land produces SMX, the Search Marketing Expo conference series. SMX events deliver the most comprehensive educational and networking experiences - whether you're just starting in search marketing or you're a seasoned expert.