Bing Adds Facebook and Twitter Features, Steps Up Social Services
Microsoft’s Bing is getting an important update – a new section on its search engine that will aggregate tweets, twitter trends and popular links being shared on Facebook. Yusuf Mehdi, a SVP at Microsoft, demo’d the Bing social service during his keynote at SMX Advanced conference in Seattle on Wednesday, and expects these features to help differentiate Bing competitively.
In October of 2009, bing.com/twitter launched, causing a frenzy in the social media space. Now, Bing.com/social is set to launch as the first search experience that integrates popular Facebook content from the stream as we as Facebook fan pages. . For example, a search for “NBA Finals” will return fan-page content from Facebook, including posts from a local TV station.
Also, only popular shared links from users who are publishing to ‘everyone’ will be aggregated for all non-fan page content.
“You’re able to now harness the power of the social community to find out what’s going on,” Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s senior vice president for Online Business Audience, said at the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle on Wednesday.
Bing’s technology is continuing to receive a lot of investment from Microsoft as part of its plan to capture market share from Google. The re-designed homepage incorporating both Twitter and Facebook data should give Bing the edge in gaining traction, Mehdi believes.
“We’ve grown every month since we launched. That’s truest proof case of whether its working or not,” he said.
Below is an example of the re-designed home page for MTV Movie Awards.
You can check out the video here.
