As Satya talked about today, building on our exclusive collaboration with Facebook  we will soon be rolling out another update designed to make search more social and relevant.   

Over the last several weeks, we introduced the new “Liked” results feature that uses the basis of your query to surmise your intent and surface relevant stories or websites  that your friends on Facebook have liked with a nice answer, called out somewhere on the page.   For instance, if I search for “Bistro Cuisine, Seattle” and my friend has liked “Stumbling Goat Restaurant in Seattle” it will show as a liked result based on the fact that my friend has pressed the “Like” button on this business listing on Citysearch. 

Based on the positive customer feedback, we are taking this feature a step further expanding the results to include even more sites.  Starting today, if your search results include a specific link that has also been “liked” by someone in your Facebook network the link will be highlighted as “Liked” within Bing.  This gets especially interesting for a query like “Xbox” where my friend “Liked” the “Kinect” site and while our algorithms didn’t feel it was relevant enough to make it the ‘answer’ we reference above, we are still able to indicate that my friend liked that link that happened to show up within the results.

 

 

Stay tuned- we have lots more in store on the social front. 

Paul Yiu – Group Program Manager, Bing

This feature is currently only available in the US.