Tuesday, June 15, 2010

New Social Search for Bing - More Real-Time Indexing

Bing has launched a new Social Search product according to Sarah Perez writing earlier today for Microsoft's Channel 10.

A little history.

Almost exactly 1 year ago, we implied that Microsoft had stuck an early deal with Facebook to include more of their content in 'Bing'.  (It's no secret that Microsoft also holds a small financial interest in Facebook).

The results on Bing seemed, at that time, to return more in depth content from Facebook than Google, or for that matter ... anyone else.

Enter 2010. 'Real-Time' gets noticed in a big way.  Twitter licenses their 'firehose' to a variety of companies including both Google and Microsoft's Bing.  Facebook, makes numerous changes to 'open' their data (or yours, depending on how you looked at it).

Then came the whole Facebook privacy explosion, with numerous changes to Facebook that were met with opposition by many, and culminated with a 'Disconnect from Facebook' day last month.  A day which predictably was NOT successful with just a small percentage of users disengaging from the social network.

If you're not familiar with the drama ... you can read back some of it ... here, here, here and here.

Essentially, Bing has expanded their previously launched Twitter trend product (which looks very much like TwitScoop?!) to include public Facebook information.

As for No.1 search competitor Google, if you haven't noticed it yet, they too are hyper-indexing social networks. As part of last month's left column redesign, searching for something then going to 'updates' will return results from Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, MySpace and yes, Google Buzz:



The real-time wave continues.  In reality, it's all pretty amazing to watch.

Note: Bing Social actually went live on June 9th when it was announced at SMX Advanced in a 'keynote chat' featuring Bing Vice President Yusef Mehdi on stage with Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan.