Bing’s new Facebook Social Search integration is now available

Earlier last month, Bing and Facebook announced a new partnership which brings new social search features into Bing based on an individual’s Facebook network. Today, Microsoft announced that this feature is now officially available to all US users (if you’re not in the US, you can still take advantage of this by visiting http://www.bing.com/?mkt=en-us).

With this new update, users are now able to sign-in to their Facebook account within Bing to get more personalised search results based on their social network. The first of which is Liked Results which shows you any relevant links that had been “Liked” by your Facebook friends:

Liked by your Facebook friends results

Secondly, this new update also brings Facebook Profile Search directly into Bing, however, there had been some changes to the way it works compared to what was previously announced:

  1. Assuming you have selected to share information with your friends inside Facebook, you will show up in profile searches in Bing, even if you have selected not to have profile information show up in public search engines. This is similar behavior to the way Facebook works. It’s important to note that you will not show up in web searches on major search engines including Bing, just in Facebook Profile Searches within Bing conducted by your friends or friends of friends.
  2. Facebook requires users to be 13 years of age or older to join the service. Bing originally limited profile search results to people 18 and older. Our customers told us is that if they already had a Facebook friend relationship with a person under 18, they would like those people to surface in Bing’s results as well. So we have changed that feature to allow any Facebook user who has these features active to show up in searches for their friends or friends of friends, which is more like the experience customers have within Facebook.

Facebook Profile Search

Remember that all these social search features are “personalised” for each user’s own view only – so rest assured that your Facebook profile will not be displayed publically to everyone else (unless you’ve set it to public of course). Now speaking of the Facebook “Likes” platform, remember to “Like” our posts here on LiveSide to share our posts with your Facebook friends (and their Bing search results!)