Microsoft has deepened its ties with Facebook to make Bing’s search engine more social, as the two firms look to challenge Google’s dominance of the search sector.
The deal, an expansion of a previous search tie-up sealed last year, will see Microsoft add further Facebook information into Bing’s search results, giving users a deeper look into their “friends” likes and dislikes.
Before, Bing let users know if their Facebook friends had “liked” any of the search results they were seeing.
Now Microsoft is giving a greater preference to “liked” search results in Bing’s results ranking.
From this week, when users search Bing after linking both accounts, they’ll see faces of their friends.
Bing will also calculate how many people in general “like” certain search results, outside of a user’s shere of Facebook friends.
Microsoft, a minority shareholder in Facebook, is betting that data from Facebook will make its search superior to Google’s dominant search engine, which still commands about 65 to 70 percent of the U.S. search market.
Both Google and Microsoft are already doing this with Twitter, but Stefan Weitz, Bing’s director, said Microsoft has moved most of Twitter’s integration to its News section.
“Twitter is more temporal than Facebook,” Weitz said. “We didn’t like how we saw other companies jamming Twitter into their pages.”
Last month, Google launched its own take on social search with Google +1, letting people share their recommendations for websites and online advertisers on search results.
