Social Meets Search with the Latest Version of Bing, Available to Everyone in US Today
A few weeks ago, we introduced you to the most significant update to Bing since our launch three years ago, combining the best of search with relevant people from your social networks, including Facebook and Twitter.
Context & Ripple Effects
This rollout completes an arc Bing has been building since July 2009, when it first brought a bit of Twitter into its results, then formalized the Facebook partnership at the October 2010 Bing-Facebook announcement and shipped its first social search features in November 2010. What was an experiment is now the default experience: Microsoft calls this its most significant update since launch three years ago, and it goes live for every US user today rather than as an opt-in feature.
First-order effects
- Every US Bing query can now surface relevant people from a searcher's Facebook and Twitter networks alongside standard web results, making the social graph part of the core ranking rather than a side pane.
- Facebook and Twitter gain a standing pipe into Microsoft's search traffic, converting their relationship from a data licensing arrangement into a shared product surface.
Second-order effects
- Because Facebook already converts users' Likes into paid advertisements shown to their friends — as the Nick Bergus lubricant-post episode demonstrated — social search hands advertisers a path to place friend endorsements inside search results themselves.
- Privacy positioning turns competitive: Twitter earned a strong showing in the EFF's assessment of company privacy practices while Facebook absorbed criticism for turning posts into ads without users' intent, raising the bar for how each partner's data is presented in Bing.
Third-order effects
- If friend-and-follower signals hold up as ranking inputs, engines that lack a social graph become dependent on the few companies that own one, entrenching Facebook and Twitter as gatekeepers for personalized search.
- Using other people's activity in someone's results points toward the same consent fight Facebook's ad practices have already triggered, likely drawing privacy advocates and eventually regulators into how search personalization sources its data.
The trend: Search is absorbing the social graph as a ranking input, with the Microsoft-Facebook-Twitter alliance as the clearest test of whether friend data or algorithmic authority wins the results page.