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Facebook-Microsoft Deal Would Matter...If Anyone Searched On Bing

Paresh Dave |
October 13, 2010 | 2:35 p.m. PDT

Executive Producer

Searches on Bing would have the option of logging in with their Facebook account to receive personalized search results. (Image from Microsoft promotional video)
Searches on Bing would have the option of logging in with their Facebook account to receive personalized search results. (Image from Microsoft promotional video)
Microsoft made a stand Wednesday miles away from Google headquarters, announcing a deal with social network giant Facebook that would bring social data from Facebook to provide personalized results on Microsoft's search engine, Bing.

Here's how BusinessInsider explained the product would work:

If you're looking for a steak house in San Francisco, Bing wil be able to look at your friends' likes and dislikes to rank certain restaurants higher or lower.

Same thing with videos: a video that a lot of your friends have posted will show up higher in Bing results than a video that hasn't.

One problem though, Facebook doesn't have dislike buttons. But the idea is generally similar to the boxes you can currently find on Pandora, Yelp and CNN.com that, when you're logged into Facebook, show you what music, places and articles your friends have liked. Now, all that data from your social network comes to search results.
The exclusive deal with Facebook would be a tremendous catch for Microsoft if anyone used their search engine. Barely more than one in 10 Internet users search on Bing, according to ComScore numbers released Wednesday.
Personalized search results are not going to be enough to drive users to Bing. People who use Google will continue to use Google, which is why Google's market share of searches has held steady at about 65 percent. In September, almost 11 billion of the 16 billion searches made went through Google. Microsoft will gain very little on the figure from the deal.
Instead, Facebook's continued innovation is Google's primary threat. Increasing amounts of traffic to major websites is coming from postings to Facebook, though not necessarily at the expense of Google.
The question for Google is: in a world that values the opinions of friends more than of robots, how does the company's search engine provide the stream of personalization that Facebook offers? Google Instant Search has been a novel approach, but the concept has been plagued by perhaps being too instant. It's tougher to find older content through the search engine. But Facebook forced Google to become more immediate. Now, that the Google has that, can it gain your trust in the way that your friends have received your trust?
For privacy watchers, the personalization service requires an opt-in and no data will go from Bing to Facebook (at least not yet).
Am I wrong, or are you about to start using Bing now?
In other Facebook news Wednesday, the website announced that users can get one-time passwords that self-destruct in 20 minutes.

Reach executive producer Paresh Dave here. Follow him on Twitter: @peard33.

 


 

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