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Bing Launches Linked Pages, Promises Better People Search Results

Barry Schwartz on February 22, 2012 at 2:25 pm

Microsoft Bing announced a new feature named Linked Pages. The purpose is to make the search results for you and your friends more personalized as well as richer.

If I am friends with you and you do a search in Bing for [barry schwartz] you will see the following search result at the top:

Linked Pages lets you tell Bing which pages in the search results are specifically about your friend. The example Microsoft gave was the common name John Smith, but it also works with less common names such as Barry Schwartz. If you follow search, you are probably more interested in seeing information about me than maybe the famous psychologist or Cofounder of Calvin Klein.

Bing allows me to “link” search results to my person profile so that I can associate my Wikipedia page, my LinkedIn profile, my company profile, my blogs and so forth with this search result. This would make searching for your friends more relevant for you and obviously help Bing get some more structured data about web pages on the internet and how they related to your Facebook and other social profiles on the internet.

How To Set It Up:

(1) Login to Linked Pages with your Facebook account.

(2) Then grant Bing permission to post to Facebook on the following screen.

(3) Then Bing will show you a search query for your name, go through the results (or refine the query) and click “link to me”.

(4) If you accidentally link the wrong page, don’t worry, you can unlink the page as well.

(5) You can even link search results to other people, like your friends. Just search for a friend and link pages about them.

Here is a video demo on this feature:

Postscript: See our follow-up story, Bing Posts To Facebook Timeline If You Use New “Linked Pages”

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.