Evolving Search on Facebook

Almost two-and-a-half years ago, Bing and Facebook started down a path to make search more social. We both firmly believed that people possess the keys to unlock a world of knowledge previously inaccessible via traditional search. There was increasingly an opportunity to improve discovery on the web by giving people an easy way to use their friends as a “search signal.”

Even before we started making search more social with Facebook, Bing provided web search for the social network. It was, admittedly, only the beginning.

Earlier today during a press event at Facebook headquarters, Facebook showed the work they have done to allow you to search the content you have shared on Facebook – called Graph Search. This means people can search across all their content and connections on Facebook to discover new people, places and things.

As part of this product, our two engineering teams worked together to advance a unified search experience. That means that when people want to search beyond Facebook, they see web search results from Bing with social context and additional information such as Facebook pages.

To the Facebook user, they will not only see useful results, but we think have serendipitous experiences. Imagine searching for Jay-Z concerts on Facebook, and not only finding Facebook content, but also web results from Bing including concert tickets, news about the tour and other web results—annotated with Facebook Likes and Shares. We think this is a powerful combination.

Now when you do a web search on Facebook, the new search results page features a two-column layout with Bing-powered web results appearing on the left-hand side overlaid with social information from Facebook including how many people like a given result. On the right hand side, you will see content from Facebook Pages and apps that are related to your search.

Over the next several weeks our two teams will continue to experiment and innovate towards our shared vision of giving people access to the wisdom of their friends combined with the information available on the web.

– Derrick Connell, Corporate Vice President of Search, Bing