Bing is first engine to integrate Facebook ‘Likes’

And so it has come to pass. A major search engine (Bing) has integrated Facebook’s ‘liked results’ into its searches.
Facebook already partners with Microsoft on a number of initiatives and Microsoft was an early investor in the budding social network. The fact Facebook ‘Likes’ are now fully integrated into Bing searches is the biggest step so far in ‘social search’.
The web today is social. The vast majority of information whirling around on the web is passed via social networks, and the current Lords of the Realm are Facebook and Twitter. If the last decade was the ‘Google era’, that era is now swiftly becoming less relevant.
Search engines, like Google, are plagued by oceans of awful content created by content farms for key words searches. If you search today on Google you have to wade through oceans of bad advertising information and rivers of hard-sell marketing dross. Not surprisingly, social search is now taking off in a big way.
Asking for information from your social networks is much better than a random search dictated by robots and algorithms. A person is much more likely to trust the opinion of a friend or contact than that of a piece of phony data spewed out by a content farm and pushed forward by an algorithm.
As the Bing team wrote on its blog: “While we are very excited to talk about our next development, we’re all aware that it’s all part of a longer journey. This is the first time in human history that people are leaving social traces that machines can read and learn from, and present enhanced online experiences based on those traces. As people spend more time online and integrate their offline and online worlds, they will want their friends’ social activity and their social data to help them in making better decisions. Integrating with Twitter data 16 months ago was one step, and exploring Facebook’s rich streams is another.”
This is the dawning of a new ear of search, one that will no doubt provide marketers and businesses with enormous swathes of insights into consumer behaviour and an era that will change the way goods and services are marketed and sold.