Bing Feature Update: Shop, compare and share on Facebook with new Bing shopping features
Having a tough time deciding between Xbox 360 Slim or Xbox Kinect? Black pumps or knee-high boots? Netbook or notebook? — Bing shopping has always let you compare prices, see product reviews and links to where you can purchase.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second act of Bing's shopping-social push in 2010: back in May, Bing introduced Shop and Share, and last month it rolled out social search features that surface friends' activity in results. Today's shopping update extends that same Facebook plumbing to purchase decisions specifically — price comparison, reviews, and buy links, plus the ability to poll friends on choices like Xbox 360 Slim versus Kinect.
The timing matters because Facebook was confirmed in late November 2010 as accounting for roughly 25% of US web traffic, making it the distribution channel Bing most wants embedded in its results — a lever Microsoft has that rivals lack.
First-order effects
- Shoppers comparing products on Bing can now push their deliberations straight to Facebook, turning a private search session into a friend-sourced recommendation loop without leaving the search page.
- Microsoft gains a differentiated shopping surface: product queries return not just prices and reviews but social context drawn from Facebook, which competing search engines cannot replicate through their own graphs.
Second-order effects
- Retailers listed in Bing shopping get a new organic referral path, since each shared comparison exposes product links to a shopper's entire friend network — free distribution that rewards being in Bing's index.
- Merchants and comparison-shopping intermediaries face rising pressure to optimize for shareable presentation (reviews, imagery, deal framing) because the sharing mechanic amplifies whichever listings users choose to broadcast.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, commerce queries become social by default, and the decisive asset in shopping search shifts from crawl breadth to access to a social graph — structurally advantaging the Microsoft-Facebook axis over graph-less competitors.
- Search marketing budgets would follow: as friend-shared product links influence purchases, advertisers and retailers shift spend toward social-optimized listings rather than pure keyword placement, reshaping how shopping traffic is bought.
The trend: Web search is being reorganized around the social graph, with shopping — where a friend's opinion most directly changes a decision — as the first battleground between Bing's Facebook partnership and rivals without equivalent data access.