Bing Social Results Arrive on iPad Today
Earlier this week, we started rolling out a new streamlined design for our social sidebar feature making it easier to find people who are relevant to your search based on what they've shared, blogged or tweeted about.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the third act of a slow build: Bing first wired Twitter into its results in July 2009, added dedicated social search features in November 2010, then made the social sidebar available to every US user in June 2012. Today's news extends that same sidebar — with a streamlined design rolled out earlier this week — to the iPad, closing the gap between desktop and tablet search experiences.
The pickup was broad for a feature port: Engadget, TechCrunch, Search Engine Land, The Next Web and five other outlets covered the iPad arrival on or about December 14, 2012, signaling that where Bing ships its social layer matters as much as what the layer does.
First-order effects
- iPad users searching on Bing now see the social sidebar surfacing people relevant to their query based on what they have shared, blogged or tweeted — previously a desktop-first experience.
- Microsoft completes the device sweep of the June 2012 US-wide social rollout, making the sidebar a default part of Bing rather than an opt-in experiment.
Second-order effects
- Bing's social results deepen its reliance on third-party activity streams — tweets, blogs, shares — raising the stakes of its data partnerships with the platforms that feed them.
- Rival search engines face pressure to match social layering on tablets specifically, since the iPad is the form factor where Microsoft is choosing to prove parity.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, search differentiation shifts from link ranking alone toward whose network of people and shared content sits beside the results — a contest fought device by device.
- Sustained investment in the sidebar since 2009 points toward social signals becoming permanent infrastructure in web search rather than a bolt-on feature.
The trend: Bing has been steadily converting social activity streams into core search infrastructure since 2009, and the iPad rollout extends that conversion across form factors.