Bing and Facebook Team Up to Display Social Search Results

At an event earlier today, Facebook teamed up with Microsoft and announced that Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, will now be able to display social search results, which are search results that relate themselves to Facebook user data.

When a user searches with Bing, it will attempt to connect to said user’s Facebook account, gather various bits of data, then attempt to relate the data to the search results via a Facebook module that will travel up and down the search page based on Bing’s ranking algorithms. For example, if you have an active Facebook profile and search Bing for Justin Bieber, a Facebook module will pop up within your search results and incriminate all of your Facebook friends who Facebook-liked the Biebster.

In the future, the Facebook correlations will appear under the related links.

If that weren’t creepy enough, Bing will also use gathered Facebook data to better aid people searches, playing what amounts to a game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Luckily, Bing will allow users to opt out of what is essentially their Facebook spying program and Facebook will also have an opt-out option within its privacy settings.

(via TechCrunch)

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James Plafke