Bing announced last week several initiatives that will tie it in tighter with Facebook. Facebook recently had its sixth anniversary, which is pretty old in Internet terms, but has gotten really hot in the last couple of years.
Bing is the search provider on Facebook. In other words, when you run a search on Facebook and get all the results that Facebook can provide — people, groups, and so on — you get Web results at the bottom, and those are provided by Bing. Bing’s Web search integration will be extended to outside the US, covering all of Facebook’s 400 million users, and Bing will soon be integrating additional features into its Facebook Web results, including (I hope!) its rich search answers. (So I can search on Facebook for red beans and rice and get fan pages, groups, and recipes!)
I suspect there will be a closer tie-up with Facebook appearing in Bing’s search results, but after a few tests searches I’m not seeing it yet. As Bing mentioned in its announcement, it’ll take several weeks/months for all this to shake out.
This is good for Bing. They’ve got a big role in one of the hottest properties on the Web. Twitter has an API and is appearing in all kinds of search results. What are the other hot independent Web properties that haven’t teamed up with a major player? Yelp, maybe? Foursquare?
Categories: News