Microsoft 'friends' Facebook to make search social

What if your search engine could somehow bring in the people you trust most?

What if your search engine could somehow bring in the people you trust most?

That is how Microsoft introduced the new features it is adding in to its search engine, Bing, to make its search more 'social.'

Bing and Facebook have partnered through Facebook's Instant Personalization programme that lists Pandora, Rotten Tomatoes, Yelp and Microsoft’s document collaboration site Docs.com as its partners.

Bing is the latest to join the Facebook’s Instant Personalization partners. If you are logged into Facebook, these sites use your friends and ‘likes’ to provide a much more personalized experience.

One of the features that Bing now has through using your Facebook data is that when you use Bing to search for a name, results from Facebook show up inside the search results.


The other key feature is that when searching on Bing, the search engine includes results based on the things that your Facebook friends have ‘liked’ and shared on the web. Searching for a movie, for example, will show which, if any, of your friends ‘liked’ a particular movie under the search results for the movie on IMDb or Rotten Tomatoes.

And lastly, you can add people as friends or send them a message directly through the results page of your search.

This is the latest partnership with Microsoft has made with Facebook after bringing Facebook updates and chat to its Windows Live Messenger service.

This follows a string of innovations in Bing that has Google clamoring to integrate similar features in its search product, google.com.

With additional reporting by Hassan Asif.
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