Back in October of last year, bing.com/twitter launched the first ever search experience powered by the Twitter firehose. Today at SMX Advanced, Bing’s Senior Vice President, Yusuf Mehdi, sat down with Danny Sullivan to announce bing.com/social – the first search experience integrating the full Facebook firehose with non-pages content. Below are some of the highlights that you will find on bing.com/social which will be live later today:
Status updates and shared links from Facebook fan pages
In addition to Tweets, we also search through Facebook fan page updates and surface matching results. For example, a search for “NBA Finals” will return fan-page content from Facebook, including posts from a local TV station.
Aggregate shared link data for non-fan pages
For non-fan pages, we only surface popular shared links from Facebook users in the aggregate form, and only from users who have set their status updates to be shared with “everyone.” No names or photos, or even the text in the update associated with the link are published – just the link in aggregate. For example, searching for “World Cup” will show what links Facebook users are sharing on the topic – with a caption that is extracted from the original article shown below the link. When we don’t have an interesting caption to show, we sometimes display how many users have shared that link.
New homepage
Finally, we’re introducing a re-designed homepage that shows improved trending topics derived from both Twitter and Facebook data. For each trending topic, we also show information about why it’s trending, a snippet of results from our social corpus, followed by query refiners on the bottom. Below is an example for MTV Movie Awards.
We plan to add more features to our social vertical in the near future, so please check back often and look for new changes on bing.com/social!
Lawrence Kim – Bing
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