Bing and Facebook Supply”Friendly” Results?
October 17th, 2010
If you’ve read for very long, you know how I feel about the “next big thing” in search. I wait a while, usually assuming that the next big thing, won’t really be all that big a deal. I’m usually right about these things, of course. Now, social media is important, it plays a role and will continue to play a role in web marketing. For web marketing, it is the “next big thing”. But, in the case of search, specifically, I’m not ready to say the same. I think social matters, it’s important and we encourage our clients to utilize many aspects of social media. But, when it comes to search, I am still in the camp that says SEO is your bread and butter. It allows the people who want what you have to find and buy from you. Simple as that.
If you haven’t heard, Bing and Facebook are joining forces to provide users with a new kind of search result. Bing is going to use data from Facebook social signals (likes, shares, comments, etc.) from your friends to personalize your search results. They are comparing these signals to links in regular SEO. They want these social signals to create a sort of “PageRank” for evaluating the relevancy of your results, based on your friends online activities.
Bing’s social search project is interesting, no doubt. I’m curious to see how it pans out. From a search marketing standpoint, I think that really, the most useful thing to come out of it will be local results. So far, Bing can’t touch Google. Google is always going to be just a click away. Also, I don’t know about you, but I think most people aren’t going to find their friends online activities too relevant when they are researching how to fix their garbage disposal or hunting for the best deal on Jeep accessories, unless they happen to have a lot of plumbers or Jeep enthusiasts for friends. It will have a bigger impact when it comes to “googling” people, such as potential hires, finding event details, restaurants, doctors, dentists or other more local related information.
I’m gonna reserve judgment for now, it’ll be interesting to see how it all pans out. If Bing could recruit some users, (which they might draw some curious folks with this new partnership) it would probably have greater impact, but for now I’m gonna guess that while it might be cool to mess around with, I don’t think a significant number of people will start using Bing simply because their Facebook friends activities will be reflected in the results. Either way, this will be interesting to watch.
This is just the beginning – as with any of these big changes, partnerships, improvement, it’s going to take a while to roll it all out, and by then they will have tweaked and changed a few things. This is not going to be the end of traditional search – the “Liked” results don’t change the regular results that Bing would provide, it adds your friends data, if there is any to your results page.
Lastly, I’d like to offer this thought – what about privacy? Facebook is notoriously bad about protecting privacy, and now they are dumping all of this data into a search engine. How much will really remain private? We all should know better by now than to put anything online unless you want the world to know about it – just sayin’ – and this makes that statement that much more relevant.
If you’d like more information, opinion, discussion on this new Bing/Facebook venture, check out the following sites:
http://searchengineland.com/bing-now-with-extra-facebook-see-what-your-friends-like-52848
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/10/13/social-search-links-are-dead-social-is-the-new-pagerank
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/13/facebook-and-microsoft-team-up-on-social-search/





