Bing and Klout Partner to Strengthen Social Search and Online Influence

In May we introduced sidebar, bringing you relevant information from friends, experts and enthusiasts across social networks to help you find anything from technical tips and restaurant advice to the latest media buzz – right within Bing. Since then, we’ve added new partners and expanded our social data to include the top social networks on the web like Facebook, Twitter, foursquare and Quora – and we’re not done yet!

Today, we’re excited to announce that Bing and Klout are partnering to help enrich the discovery and recognition of influencers across our platforms. This is an alliance based on a shared belief that people are at the center of task completion. To help you find the right person we need to determine who is influential and trusted on different topics on the web. Bing and Klout share this vision. In addition to the technical partnership described below, we are announcing that we are making a strategic investment in Klout.

Klout brings a deep social DNA to the table having done some very cool and exciting work to help people understand social influence, find their voice and have an impact on the world. When we combine that expertise with the work our Bing team has done on the marriage of search and social, along with the big science challenges around relevance and ranking (especially people ranking), there are exciting possibilities for what we can do together for web users. Our engineering teams will work together to expand the scope of social search and influence.

In our products, we have some interesting integrations into Bing and also into Klout. On Bing, we will surface Klout scores and influential topics for many of the experts in the People Who Know section of the sidebar. Klout as a social influence signal in the sidebar will really help customers connect with the right experts on the topics they are searching for.

As part of Klout’s recently unveiled moments feature, we’ll begin surfacing Bing highlights on some Klout users profiles, demonstrating how search can be a powerful new indicator of online influence. What’s interesting about our work on the Klout service is that for the 1st time Bing is an outbound signal for influence. Search as a new outbound signal is an interesting new development in the way we think about big data and how it can add value to lots of the other services we use each day.

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This is just the beginning of Bing and Klout’s partnership and we believe that there’s a lot of exciting opportunities when you look at deepening the integration of social search and online influence. We hope that the partnership will ultimately lead to platform enhancements that enrich the discovery and recognition of influencers on both Bing and Klout so stay tuned!

Give it a try at bing.com. Make sure you’re logged into Facebook and start searching. Try searching for “movies, nfl schedule, or stanford university” and tell us what you think.

– Derrick Connell, Corporate Vice President, Bing