Out-Law News 2 min. read
14 Oct 2010, 4:47 pm
When users are logged into Facebook and search through Bing, results will include items that the user's Facebook friends have liked or information gleaned from Facebook profiles.
The feature can be turned off but will be turned on by default if users search while signed into Facebook, Microsoft said. They will be shown pop-up notifications the first five times they use the service, and given the opportunity to disable the feature from that notification.
"People will only see Facebook Profile Search results for people in their Facebook network when signed into Facebook," said a statement by Bing executives Paul Yiu and Todd Schwartz. "Users will only see 'like' information from their Facebook friends. In both cases, only information that is intended to be shared broadly across the internet is shared."
Microsoft is an investor in Facebook, having paid $240 million for a 1.6% stake in the company in 2007, valuing it at $15 billion. Bing search functions will also operate within Facebook itself, the company said, as part of its integration into the Facebook platform.
Microsoft said that its deal with Facebook was part of an attempt to change the basis of search results.
"Traditionally, search engines rely on a large number of clues to help us determine what you are looking for," said Satya Nadella, senior vice president at Microsoft's online services division. "This has worked pretty well over the years and helped search improve a lot – early signals like meta tags to give the engines hints on page content and reverse IP to provide more locally relevant results, which has evolved to the mobile phone with the addition of geo-location data."
"In Bing, we look at more than 1000 signals to try and get you the best result," said Nadella. "The fact is the real world isn't defined purely by how information is connected; it's also defined by the connections between people. But the signals that engines have come to rely on to help you find what you're looking for are not really representative of those human connections and the role they play in making decisions in real life."
Nadella said that Microsoft believes that using Facebook data in results will make users' friends' opinions visible to them in search results and "bring [their] trusted sources to the forefront for many of [their] searches."
"What if there was a 'social layer' in search that could make the whole process of connecting to information and making decisions more social, more personal and more useful?" said Nadella.
The company said that its Facebook integration was that social layer.
"We will build more exciting experiences on top of this social layer, as the web continues its journey from a collection of documents to a more full-blown digital society, where people matter as much as pages," said Nadella.
Dominant search engine owner Google attempted to launch its own social network earlier this year, but Buzz was derailed by privacy concerns after it made public information previously contained within users' private Gmail systems.
Facebook chief executive and founder Mark Zuckerberg said that it had chosen Microsoft as the search engine provider it wanted to work with because it was the underdog in the market, a report on The Register said.
"They really are the underdog here, so they are in a structural position to go all-out and innovate. When you are an incumbent, there's a tension to protect what you have and push new things," Zuckerberg said.
