Just a few days ago Facebook announced the opening of beta testing for its new Facebook Graph Search project which allows users to find information through friends and connections. However, another technology giant is offering similar services even before Facebook.
Microsoft (shock, horror), has already incorporated a more straightforward way to search Facebook status updates from friends into its search engine Bing. Using the social sidebar, users can now retrieve even more information from their friends on Facebook.
The bar already displayed information related to queries from Twitter, Foursquare and other social networks while now it also incorporates status updates, comments and other information from Facebook friends delivering a more refined search result.
This will allow Bing to already cater to users looking for more social search results and gain a significant share of users before Facebook launches its Graph Search. The move will further allow Bing to grow its market share over Google further cementing its position as the second biggest search engine globally.
Bing’s corporate vice president Derrick Connell spoke to CNET about the latest feature and said:
“Initially, Bing only pulled in data from Facebook friends related to a query based on what they ‘like,’ and information in their Facebook profiles such as where they live, work, and went to school.”
Adding further he said:
“Now, Bing pulls content including status updates, shared links, photos they’ve shared, and comments related to a query. All of these new signals add up to about five times more information Bing can index per user.”
Bing’s user base will be more than happy with the new feature while more users might adopt the search engine in the future.
Source: Cnet
Photo: Bing