Bing Adds Facebook 'Friend Effect' With Collective IQ To Search

[engine]

Bing Adds Facebook 'Friend Effect' With Collective IQ To Search [bing.com]

Today, Bing is bringing the collective IQ of the Web together with the opinions of the people you trust most, to bring the “Friend Effect” to search. Starting today, you can receive personalized search results based on the opinions of your friends by simply signing into Facebook. New features make it easier to see what your Facebook friends “like” across the Web, incorporate the collective know-how of the Web into your search results, and begin adding a more conversational aspect to your searches. Decisions can now be made with more than facts, now the opinions of your trusted friends and the collective wisdom of the Web.

You can quickly see what your friends like and are sharing. Find and connect with the right friends faster. Pick the brains of friends of who live where you’re traveling and share shopping lists with your own team of retail gurus. And, return the favor to your friends by liking more things on the Web. With one click you can let your network know that you like a brand, an article, a celebrity or even a place. Because we know the best decisions are not just fueled by facts, they require the opinions and recommendations of your friends.

There's also a new Bing toolbar with a 'like' button.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

By having your friends be a measuring stick in search results publishers now need to target those friends in order to get a page in front of you, and so they will. Top rankings in search SHOULD involve content that can stand on its own but sadly this move brings us closer to a point where something other than quality decides what Joe and Jane doe see in serps.

Let the games begin, publishers everywhere devise ways of artificially increasing your circle of "friends", go!

/sigh

This SHOULD be entirely separate from actual search results yet there it is, combined. Some of the best content online is old and will never get a "like" button and so it's doomed to fade away? That's a shame.

[RhinoFish]

and i'm going to have to start choosing my friends more wisely...

:-)

[Panthro]

And not everyone is willing to publicly "like" something. Haven't read the article yet, but I wonder if this will apply to mobile searches while a user is running a FB app.

[incrediBILL]

Here we go, this is huge, this is the start.

This is what I've said before, if Bing is smart they'll leverage Facebook into becoming a true Google competitor.

[JoePublisher]

"Today, search remains largely driven by facts and links – we think it’s time to change that ..." Yusuf Mehdi, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft.

If this is not a DIRECT, UNEQUIVOCAL, challenge to Google and their way of doing search I don't know what is. 'Them Thar Is Fighting Talk' [sic].

Being locked out of facebook data, limited by the lack of evergreen stature of Tweets, and desperate for +1 to work out, you can see Google knows this is a big threat to them.

It's no longer about if you think this data is any good, or should or should not be leveraged - its about what the BIG 3 see as the future of search; and more importantly what will win over the hearts and minds of common people who search for over 1 billion things a day. But this isn't going to happen over night, this is a tectonic shift over the next decade ...

incrediBILL is right, if you did not just hear the 'glove being thrown down' on reading that article, what did you just hear?

________

.... "Bing and Facebook are making a bet – one that will marry the logic of search, with the recommendations and opinions of your social network and the masses – to extend search beyond just fact-based decision making, to decisions that are made with the power of people AND search."

How are Google going to respond to that? By using +1 (but only if they can make it successful) and 'perhaps' part of the PANDA update (and future tweeks) to their Algo, which makes the next phase of search possible when +1 gets here ... The BIG 3 obviously see the map of search changing, significantly, do you?

"Search is better when it’s not just based in math and algorithms, but also infused with the opinions of people." They just stuck it to the nerds at the Plex ...

[Alcoholico]

What a pity! I thought Bing was still an option but with this move they have proven quite the opposite. They are trying to force every webmaster and everybody to share their data with a company that I, and many people, do not trust at all. Why would I want to put a "like" stupid button on all of my pages, I wrote those things, I have worked hard for years, fb gives me nothing, why should they get any pixels and free advertising on MY pages? Why would I want a fb account in the first place?, I have plenty of friends in real life and I am not looking to get laid or waste my time playing farmville. I do not, and will not, ever need or want a fb account.
Back to keep promoting google. No other real option. I miss what the Web used to be and the potential it had. I miss infoseek.

[incrediBILL]

Why would I want a fb account in the first place?, I have plenty of friends in real life and I am not looking to get laid or waste my time playing farmville. I do not, and will not, ever need or want a fb account.

To be a successful webmaster you need to roll with the trends, regardless of your personal feelings, otherwise your competition will destroy you.

Head in the sand may work for Ostriches but its a bad web tactic.

[zuko105]

waiting for the day where Bing.com just has 2 links on the homepage. One to twitter and one to facebook. They'll call it revolutionary.

Cynic? Me? ...yes.

[JoePublisher]

What was of most interest to me (as I watched the Bing Video on SERoundtable link) was the Facebook 'Like' button on the new Bing bar!

If most people switch to Bing, and incorporate the Bing Bar, (is this as standard in I.E. ?) I can get rid of the facebook like button (and the associated page load times) from my site - and just leaving the meta:og data in the <head> section of the code - to trigger the bells and whistles when a person likes the page.

win win ... no need of bloated code on my page and people can still like it, which would also work for truculent webmasters who fight against incorporating facebook into their site ...

"Bing is also bringing forth very popular pages based on global Facebook 'Like' data and even showing anonymous messages from Facebook users on the Bing results under those results" SERoundtable. 'Monied' sites may still do well, but if your content is good enough, liked by a natural cross-section of 'actual' Facebook users, then you can compete on the first page of SERPs.

Yes it can be 'gamed' (but not for long, only until the algo matures - you should not be looking at this as a thing of today, but of 'tomorrow') and when supplemented by any likes by 'true' friends, whose opinion you trust, this could be a new step in a man/math holistic approach to search ...

-----------

However, does this mean that Facebook users will be ranked in order of 'trust'? Or even 'good judgement'? i.e. some opinions will count for more than others? So auto 'likes' from paid sources will be discounted? ... food for thought ... I know it already happens with google and twitter users who have more or less standing as 'authorities' on a topic ...

[edited by: JoePublisher at 7:22 pm (utc) on May 17, 2011]

[stajer]

I believe google already launched a version of this several months ago. If you link your twitter/fb/linkedin/etc accounts to your google profile, your search results will highlight those links "liked" or otherwise promoted by your friends in those networks.

From Google Connected Accounts [profiles.google.com ]:

Connecting your accounts puts you in control:
When you search, you can see relevant content your friends share on the web.
You make it easier for them to find the stuff you share on the web.
You can choose which accounts to show by creating a public Google Profile.
Remember, Google won’t share your searches or other private information with third-party services without your consent.

[nomis5]

Bing and their darling Facebook link up - oh my gosh, what a surprise!

[incrediBILL]

I believe google already launched a version of this several months ago.

Yes, but Google isn't directly integrated into Facebook, Bing is, this is a battle for the mindshare of Facebook directly and the tighter they integrate this partnership the harder it'll be to separate down the road.

Microsoft buys Facebook, could/should happen, would be better money spent than Yahoo.

[edited by: incrediBILL at 8:21 pm (utc) on May 17, 2011]

[JoePublisher]

Bing and their darling Facebook link up - oh my gosh, what a surprise!

Everybody knew the 'Rumble In The Jungle' was going to happen, but no one could predict the result, or the way the fight was won, until after the first 'bell'.

Well you just heard the first bell ... round 1.

[Alcoholico]

To be a successful webmaster you need to roll with the trends, regardless of your personal feelings, otherwise your competition will destroy you.

No I don't. Fortunately there still are plenty of alternative ways of promotion and sources of traffic. I still do not need to sell my soul or advertise an overvalued company for free. Competition is not a concern, I know I offer better stuff than they do, and also have better ways to promote it, I refuse to have a business model based solely on bing, google and especially fb. As far as I am concerned, fb is just a dating site for teenagers, wannabes and the like, it would be very stupid of me to advertised them for free on any of my properties, fb is a black hole, they would never return the traffic I'd send them.
All in all, this is a matter of principles, most companies do not have principles, I do. I respect my users and myself.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Bing + facebook is indeed a threat to Google. I'm surprised there's no "facemail" to replace "gmail" yet. Google maps won't matter either since bing maps will show within facebook.

Wait - facebook isn't a search engine and that's not what people want from it. It will be interesting to see if Facebook looses momentum by getting too involved with Bing.

[weeks]

Facebook Likes now affect search rankings. An article that might have normally surfaced on the second or third page of search results may appear on the first page if friends have liked it.
[mashable.com...]
For the record, I am 100 percent in Alcoholico's corner on this. I do not trust FB and I am disappointed so many do so easily. Some new laws need to get made.

That said...
It will be interesting to see if this works. I have a few websites which, if this does what they say it's going to do, I should see some change.

Alcoholico, I still think FB is a fad. Five years I hope we can laugh about how upset we were about it.

Bing has a new version of its toolbar starting tomorrow, and it will include a universal Facebook Like button. It gives you the ability to like any website or web page, regardless of whether or not it has added the Facebook Like button.

OK, that works. Whatever.

[celgins]

From incrediBill:

To be a successful webmaster you need to roll with the trends, regardless of your personal feelings, otherwise your competition will destroy you.

Very true. And whether Facebook is a fad or not, it's still a measurable success (500-600 million active) and may soon become a behemoth in online advertising.

Plus, the number of mobile Facebook users is increasing exponentially and it could serve them (and Microsoft) well to have a trusted, integrated search capability. Most folks I know who stay glued to mobile Facebook find it inconvenient to leave the application, and navigate to the Google or Bing to search the web. If Bing is integrated, the number of eyes peering at Bing SERPs will grow.

[jonathanleger]

Okay, I'm failing to see how this will have a positive impact.

How many REAL people would "like" a page that's targeting, for instance, "life insurance Modesto California"?

Seems ripe for spammers to take advantage of this by creating networks that "like" the pages they want to rank well.

Especially with sites that have user-generated content this could be a real spam-fest. For instance, Bing's example of the recipe site Epicurious allows people to submit their own recipes. What prevents people from submitting that content and getting their network of spammers to "like" that page so it ends up showing in the search results under the name "Epicurious"?

Granted, for that one particular site the advantage to doing that may be small, but for many, many other sites that accept user-generated content, the incentive is huge. It's an easy way to get a page one, number one ranking that appears to have been approved by "web wisdom."

[indyank]

People, I am seeing an increase in Direct traffic count in Google analytics report.Is Google Analytics reporting this new traffic as direct traffic?

[Shatner]

This is huge, and it's going to change the way the internet works forever.

Probably not for the better though. The truth is people don't always "like" the best content. People like things they agree with, things that are easy, often the things they like are the most dumbed down version of good content.

This will not improve the quality of content on the internet. This is going to kill it.

If you run a content site, consider writing at a fourth grade level and only expressing the opinions most likely to be agreed with by the majority. It's the only way to survive in the environment that's about to be created.

This by the way, is the same environment that makes Dancing with the Stars the #1 show on television.

The internet is about to be dominated by the content equivalent of Dancing with the Stars.

[indyank]

If Microsoft could convince Facebook to integrate Bing Search in a prominent and visible area of any page on facebook, they could make some good damage to Google's search dominance.

If they could do that, the boost that google search engine gives to its own properties like Places, shopping etc. will die.

[indyank]

I seriously don't believe that search results being influenced by your friends circle will help the users.

But Google and Bing are fighting it out to make their search engines influenced by social stuff.Let us see where it takes them next.

[indyank]

What google and bing are not realizing (or they deliberately don't want to realize) is the fact that not all connections on facebook and other social platforms are trusted connections.

You may get connected with another person because you met him once or you know him through a forum like this. This is just to say the occasional "hi, how are you" and it in no way means that they two trust or agree with everything the other person says.

In fact the best friends are known to disagree more than they agree.

[Staffa]

MS - we know the best decisions are not just fueled by facts, they require the opinions and recommendations of your friends

Wrong, only by knowing all the facts can one make an informed decision and therefore other opinions and recommendations become irrelevant.

Why would I want a fb account in the first place?, ...
To be a successful webmaster you need to roll with the trends, regardless of your personal feelings

Unbelievable. While many here are still reeling fron the disaster of slavishly following the whims of the behemoth they themselves created one is already advocating to start the same mistake all over again.

Whatever battle G and B have to fight, it's their battle not ours unless one is willing to take some of the blows handed out when the dust settles and we can then look forward to read a string of Banda threads.

This will not improve the quality of content on the internet. This is going to kill it.

Absolutely. By playing to the massee - for financial gain - search results on the big 3 have become so poor that finding good quality content is near impossible though with the millions of available web sites has to be out there somewhere. If they are now going to add the opinion of the masses to rank sites, as internet users, we may as well call it quits.

[oddsod]

While many here are still reeling fron the disaster of slavishly following the whims of the behemoth they themselves created one is already advocating to start the same mistake all over again.

I couldn't have put it better. I'm with you Alcoholico, weeks etc.

fb is just a dating site for teenagers, wannabes and the like

It's a dumb site with a shady business model as far as I am concerned. The fact that it's huge and has several hundred million zombies signing on just because their friends have done it does mean it has the eyeballs, but if you despise what FB does and it way it does it, you'll be compromising principles by helping them become even bigger.

[aristotle]

None of my websites have Like buttons on their pages, and none of them will ever have them in the future. Does this mean that they will be penalized in Bing's search rankings?

[Rosalind]

This is going to be major, and it's not a move for a better internet as far as I can see. There was a good video on TED by Eli Pariser about personalisation and filter bubbles that sums it up.

This is clearly a trend that's getting more pronounced, and it means the end of a search engine that's even remotely alike for different people. I wish we could toggle back to a default, entirely unpersonalised state. I want to know what I'm missing, and what the rest of the world is seeing, and not merely because of the SEO utility of such a thing. I want a broad view of the world, an international perspective unclouded by what my friends think and who the dominant voices are in the place I live. I want web pages in other languages instead of the constant bias in favour of English.

[JoePublisher]

The filter bubble? I watched that video with absolute certainty that guy was ‘selling’ something .... What else is a search engine supposed to do?

You can read ‘war and peace’ or read the ‘summary notes’ to find out what happens ... the answer is it depends on your capacity to understand the written word and, importantly, how much time you have available before needing to know the answer.

Filtering by social group is now more possible than ever before in search results. Is this wrong? People chose a ‘filter bubble’ in their choices each and every day without the internet, the most basic example of this social filtering is in which newspaper THEY chose to buy each day, or by how much varied information THEY are willing to expose themselves to ... remove the filter bubble and what do you get? An ‘ideal’ world view? Who’s ideal world view? The information you are presented with is still biased by the people who wrote it or say it.

What if there were no filter bubble? On the internet you are looking for information on a ‘specific thing’, but instead you get a list of ‘everything’ that is connected to that topic. This list is presented to you for you to sort out depending on what it is you actually think is ‘important’ – criteria which will be different for someone else doing that exact same search.

Good luck with that, ten minutes after that happens people will be inventing a search algo to filter the information in a more time efficient manner. Oh wait ...

What is stopping you searching out any ‘foreign’ language reports on a topic? What is stopping you getting ANY information on the web? (if you live in a democratic society, and that is more accurately called censorship and not a filter bubble).

What stops you is not knowing how to filter your search to get specifics, which affects less internet savvy users mainly, and that is called not knowing how to use a tool properly, not censorship. What also stops you? Is it not wanting to go to page 2 on the SERPs? That is called inconvenience, not a filter bubble ...

Why should what you think is important appear in the first 10 results when there are millions of results to process? Why should you not clarify your results and do a second search based on what was returned to you the first time? Or is there some conspiracy keeping you from the info first time?

A ‘filter bubble’ in SEARCH is just ‘laziness’, or ‘sloppiness’ something humans are very good at inflicting upon themselves, particularly those not able to use the tools provided to perform a task properly or with 'skill' ... a search engine can only return the most ‘popular’ results, or the most ‘relevant’ results, or the most ‘varied’ results, based on the search criteria YOU input.

Want to know about the political crisis in Egypt from a search engine? Type in ‘Political Crisis in Egypt’ and not just ‘Egypt’ ... want to know about Michael Jacksons death in the first 24 hours it happened? Type in ‘Michael Jackson Dies’ and not ‘Michael Jackson’ or use the 24 hour filter in the search engine ...

A search engine puts 10 results to a page. What do you think should come first, obviously it should be what most people want, most often, in the time frame they are willing to spend looking for it. Which may or may not meet your expectations depending on what social group you belong to.

So why not filter by social group first (perhaps using Facebook data)? Then let the searcher refine their search if needed, or in real life, as time allows. People continually limit themselves and then blame others ...

Are you talking about a ‘filter bubble’ or 'censorship' based on pre-existing hidden agendas, either economic or political? Two separate things ...

[JoePublisher]

I'm going to disagree with a few people here, not in an argumentative way, but as an aid to hopefully opening your eyes with some real world experience and the actual data I am pulling from my own facebook users ... I hope this might give you pause for thought and some of you may see an opportunity ? But there again I see no way of swaying some posters on here, and have I have no real desire, appetite or intention of doing so.

As an aside: I am totally against breaches in privacy and hope the Big 3 Internet companies either clean up their act or have it cleaned up for them (more likely). The way they do things is not how I chose to run my brand’s website. But if internet users chose to use these services in such large numbers I need to be using their tools to help reach these people with my brand.

In the UK (just like in the USA and other countries) we have three types of newspapers.

1. The 'Broadsheet' (e.g. The Times - below 1,000,000 daily readership sales). High quality, well written, mainly for a highly intelligent (Higher I.Q. with a more thorough and established educational background) and affluent audience. Discussions on World View topics etc. predominate.

2. The 'Tabloids' (e.g. The Sun - 8,000,000 daily readership sales). Sensationalist, poorly written in terms of word choice, mainly for a less intelligent, (Lower I.Q. with a shorter educational background in terms of time spent and courses covered and qualifications passed) less affluent audience. Discussions on Sport and Celebrity Gossip etc. predominate.

3. And the ‘Middle Ground’ (e.g. The Daily Mail - 3,500,000 daily readership sales). As it states, they take the middle ground between important topics and celebrity gossip – ‘titilation’ stories alongside ‘the state of the nation’ op ed’s etc. predominate.

All newspapers carry the same sections - 'Politics', 'Sport', 'Lifestyle', 'Entertainment' etc. and each day they often cover the exact same stories. But they way it is reported and the level of intelligence (I.Q. and educational background) their audience is at and the reporter is aiming at (in general) is totally different between them ...

Is the Internet so very different? Depending on the audience you want to attract you will be writing or presenting information as 'high-brow' or 'low-brow' or even 'middle-brow'. The level of your writing style filters out your audience ... in the way you write, your aims and own leadership qualities in running your website, you will naturally attract a more intellectually gifted, higher social climbing set, or the reverse.

I write 'high-brow' (for a 'broadsheet' and 'middle ground' audience) and I do not dumb down my words or information to a lower level than a college graduate would be expected to be able to read. I am selling information by 'quality' not 'quantity' and therefore I expect my readership to be lower in number than other websites who basically 'dumb' down similar information on this topic. This holds true for selling handbags or for selling information.

My facebook numbers are growing steadily, but not spectacularly, which is to be expected. In the UK, on a daily basis, ‘The Sun’ tabloid newspaper outsells ‘The Times’ broadsheet by a factor of 8 to 1. So when I look at comparable competitor facebook numbers I keep this in mind, they might have 8000 facebook likes for every 1000 I get, but the economic affluence of my 1000 is far more important in many ways to the 8000 they get.

The people liking my facebook brand page are what are called 'influencers' in the economic ABC1 groups, they have more money to spend per capita than the ‘average’ internet user. The people who ‘like’ my brand are the exact opposite from what people are describing facebook users as. These are INTELLIGENT and MATURE users.

If you are talking ‘numbers’ of course the masses who read tabloids are in greater numbers on facebook, but you don’t have to TARGET them, or rather if you offer high quality on your site you will ‘exclude’ them in a natural process of filtering.

This is not a pure form of ‘social elitism’ but what happens in everyday life, just like there is the need for the creation and publication of 3 different types of newspapers. If I was targeting the Tabloid reader then I would do it whole-heartedly and embrace this section of society in my writing and presentation of information. But I am not ...

These are some raw facebook data numbers of my actual facebook 'insights' for you to mull over, but in conclusion, from the daily interaction of hundreds of visitor feedback on my brand’s facebook page, these are highly educated and social climbing, aspirational members of society:-

Age: 13-17 = 0.5%
Age: 18-24 = 7.4%
Age: 25-34 = 23.6%
Age: 35-44 = 27.2%
Age: 45-54 = 22.7%
Age: 55+ = 16.1%

16% of my many facebook page 'likes' come from those over 55! And I have a great coverage in the coveted 25 to 44 age group ... many from California, New York and London etc. I have a very limited (to be expected) coverage of teenagers or non-English speaking facebook users. These are the same people whose facebok feeds have my brand's post appear in when I post new information (I post once a week) and they respond and reply and spread my info to other similar social groups and ages. Its a snowball effect.

If the next stage in SERPs produced by the search engines is to leverage this social data, then you can sure as bet your house I am manoeuvring (and have been now for 14 months) to be in poll position, getting mature, top quality users and 'influencers' on my side - because believe it or not they are on facebook and their numbers are growing daily .... and if you are a top quality website publisher, they are waiting to start interacting with you, and stick with you with far more ‘loyalty’.

If you still think the ‘masses’ in facebook likes will outweigh a smaller number of ‘influencers’ in the SERPs then you don’t understand how data of this sort is going to be leveraged ... if you are in the A, B, C1, C2, C3 or D social group then you will get references from people who liked things from a similar social group to you, who are doing similar searches ... so I don’t care how many thousands of people ‘liked’ a gossip page on Lady GaGa, all I care about is the far fewer number of facebook users who are looking for information and reviews on the latest Opera at Covent Garden etc. (a made up example) and believe it or not, these are the same people high quality advertisers with millions of dollars of ad spend also want to target ...

You can choose to sell information or handbags by quality or quantity, (whatever you chose ‘go for it’, with every skill and experience you have) but don’t sit there saying the internet is going to ‘hell in a hand-basket’, its the same refrain some people have been saying about society in general for thousands of years ... Facebook is no different than (western) society is, it is just a reflection of (western) civilisation from developing nations, and becoming more so with every passing day (with many similar imperfections) and therefore it is a perfect tool to aid search engines in an imperfect world.

This is what the BIG 3 are deciding to do, no matter what we think, and we can either play catch up, follow, or lead the way.

If you are not ‘selling’ anything, be it handbags or information, then what do you fear? By being straight and honest with Facebook users from an ABC1 background they will appreciate you even more and spread the word to similar types of people. If you are targeting C123 and D social types then go for it, they also just want access to information or services, just in a different way.

Use it or don’t use it, but don’t tell me Facebook isn’t useful to me and my high quality web site, or portray it as if anyone leveraging Facebook is of the ‘shady’ and ‘shallow’ type, even if you believe Facebook itself is ‘shady’. Because we are not. And very soon you are going to be left behind ... which you can chose to believe, or not.

The wild west of the internet isn’t over, it’s just that the railroad has come to town.

[edited by: JoePublisher at 2:07 pm (utc) on May 18, 2011]